Alison Salt
Honorary Research Associate
MBBS MSc FRACP FRCPCH
alison.salt@health.wa.gov.au
Associate Professor Salt is a senior Consultant Paediatrician at Perth Children’s Hospital, Kids Rehab WA, Clinical Associate Professor University of Western Australia, Associate Professor, Great Ormond Street Hospital Institute of Child Health, UCL, London, UK and Honorary Research Associate with Telethon Kids Institute.
Over 20 years working at Great Ormond Hospital for Children, London Dr Salt was Lead clinician for the Wolfson Neurodisability Service (2006 to 2013) and lead of the Developmental Vision Service and the Autism assessment service with expertise in the assessment and management of children with visual impairment, and assessment and diagnosis of children with complex neurodevelopmental disorders especially those with autism spectrum disorders.
In her current clinical role in Kids Rehab WA, she is Consultant Paediatrician for the Early Intervention service for children at high risk of cerebral palsy at Perth Children’s Hospital and provides a consultative service for children with Visual impairment to the Rehabilitation team.
Her research interests include: early intervention in young children with visual impairment, understanding the visual, environmental and neurobiological factors, influencing outcome through a long term follow-up research programme. With Dr Naomi Dale she designed and evaluated an early intervention programme for babies and young children with visual impairment; Early detection and intervention for children at risk of cerebral palsy and associated cerebral visual impairment.
A/ Prof Salt is a Co-investigator for: the NHMRC funded EARLY MOVES project, a large scale cohort study to identify early biomarkers for cognitive impairment; NHMRC Ideas grant ‘Siblings’ and the VISIBLE research study, investigating early intervention for infants with cerebral palsy and visual impairment. She is a member of the EACD funded European Consensus study to develop clinical practice guidelines for the identification, assessment and diagnosis of Cerebral Visual Impairment.
Projects
Accelerate-WA Network: Developing a sustainable family-clinician-researcher network for education and training in the early detection of cerebral palsy for all infants in Western Australia
Accelerate will develop and pilot, a multi-directorate teaching and training network for early detection of cerebral palsy (CP), encompassing key clinical partners across CAHS and WACHS.
Early Moves
The Early Moves study is investigating whether a baby’s early movements can predict difficulties with learning (known as cognitive impairment) later in childhood.
August 2020
Published research
Fine-grained Fidgety Movement Classification using Active Learning
Typically developing infants, between the corrected age of 9-20 weeks, produce fidgety movements. These movements can be identified with the General Movement Assessment, but their identification requires trained professionals to conduct the assessment from video recordings.