Combining research with front-line practice aims to improve physical rehab

Collaboration improves care for physical injuries Clinicians and patients are working together for better treatment of serious physical injuries. CTV London’s Celine Moreau has details.

There's a new approach to science that aims to improve physical rehabilitation and reduce pain.

For years Patrick Stapleton struggled with back pain that would come and go until one day it all came to a head.

“I got up one morning and thought I would be okay to go to work," he says. "I was sitting at the breakfast table and all of a sudden I felt my head was cold and clammy and next thing I woke up I was lying on the ground and couldn’t move my legs.”

It’s believed Stapleton may have had a seizure and his seized muscles caused a spinal cord injury.

It was from that moment he could no longer walk.

“I’ve exchanged feet for wheels, but I mean really the biggest thing - I can get by on the wheels, but I struggle with constant neuropathic pain.”

Stapleton has been undergoing rehabilitation therapy at the Parkwood Institute for several years now and has become part of a research project that is taking a new approach to therapy called Research to Practice or R2P.

Dr. Dalton Wolfe a scientist at Lawson Health Research Institute says, “R2P is all about really understanding how these advanced therapies may fit together to produce even greater outcomes than what’s achieved now.”

Wolfe says with R2P researchers don’t take the common scientific lab approach; rather they take the research straight to the source.

“We work with, first and foremost, people with lived experience or the patients themselves, and their family members to determine what their experiences were and how it can be improved, but just as important we work with the front-line clinicians.”

The hopes are to make this project into a full-time program to improve on patient therapies while working with patients like Stapleton on the front lines.

Wolfe explains, “Research adds to maybe someone getting a little more feeling back or a little more movement back and of course the big one everyone wants, to walk again.”