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Community mobility promotes participation for people of all ages and abilities.

This Special Issue focuses on community mobility, an essential instrumental activity of daily living (IADL). We need to be mobile to access the community across the lifespan using private vehicles (as drivers or passengers), powered or manual wheelchairs, or public transport as this enables us to visit the people and places that are central to everyday living and bring meaning to life. Community mobility enables us to participate in the school, work, self-care, leisure and social activities that connect us to our communities. Together with inclusion and equality, occupational therapists champion the right for our clients to have access, and transport accessibility is a vital element of this concept. Both nationally and internationally, occupational therapists are paying increasing attention to promoting community mobility for people of all ages and abilities. Our focus on this IADL is being pushed by demographic shifts as the proportion of older people who want and need to remain mobile in the community rises, and is being supported by new technologies that assist our clients gain or maintain transport mobility. Research in the field is also growing as evidenced, for example, by the number of occupational therapists publishing in transport journals and recent special issues on this topic in the American Journal of Occupational Therapy (Classen, 2010), and the Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy (Polgar, 2011). Furthermore, there are ever increasing educational opportunities for occupational therapists to gain specialist knowledge in this area. While countries such as Australia, the USA and Canada have had education programmes and training for occupational therapists to specialise in driver assessment and re-education for many years, courses in driver assessment/community mobility have recently commenced in Sweden (at Umea University) and in the UK (at Chester University). This Special Issue profiles the research of occupational therapists from Australia, Canada, the UK and Sweden who work with both children and adults to enable community mobility. Papers focusing on children include restraint management and promoting wheelchair independence. Determination of fitness-to-drive features prominently in the range of articles included in this issue related to adults. Articles covering developments in off-road (clinic-based) assessment as well as on-road (in-vehicle) testing are presented. Several papers have an emphasis on working with clients who have stroke since community mobility limitations can arise from the multiple physical, sensory and cognitive impairments that result from this disorder. A paper is also included on adjustment to the loss of the driving role. Community mobility isn’t a specialist area of practice and there is an increasing awareness that we need generalist occupational therapists to be more involved in evaluating clients’ community mobility, developing interventions where appropriate and referring clients when more specialist services such as on-road driver evaluations are required. This Issue publishes a series of research articles from generalist and specialist perspectives that collectively highlight the contribution occupational therapists make to enable our clients to become or remain mobile in the community. I hope this Issue provides both inspiration and support for clinicians to ensure that transport mobility is routinely addressed in practice, thereby promoting community inclusion for our clients.