ABOUT US
Education and Research
Education and research have underpinned our work for decades.
These areas were given renewed status in 2018 with the establishment of the Ducati Owners Club of NSW Education and Research Hub. Named after our long-term supporter, the Hub is designed to harness strengths, test new ideas and push the boundaries in a broad range of multidisciplinary clinical research areas. Royal Rehab’s continuous goal is the improvement and advancement of rehabilitation and disability services.
We are proud of our culture of continuous learning at Royal Rehab where staff share knowledge and research, support the ongoing education of our teams, and train clinicians and the next generation of health professionals. We are committed to excellence in learning and development, fostering a culture of continuous improvement in the quality, safety and effectiveness of our services, and informed evidence-based practice.
Our specialist doctors and clinicians train undergraduates from the University of Sydney School of Medicine. Our facility is also a teaching hospital for the Australasian Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine registrars, and we welcome international physicians to study at Royal Rehab.
Our nursing and allied health clinicians contribute significantly to student training each year from many universities. This includes a speech pathology student placement partnership with Macquarie University whereby students train in our Brain Injury Unit Speech Pathology Student Unit under the dedicated direction of a
Royal Rehab speech pathology clinical educator.
Royal Rehab’s research covers many domains including spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury and rehabilitation practice. We have a long history of leading research projects and collaborating with other researchers to enable the growth of our research knowledge base.
We are committed to excellence in learning and development, fostering a culture of continuous improvement in the quality, safety and effectiveness of our services, and informed evidence-based practice.
Our research projects for 2017-18 included:
Bowel Care for People with Spinal Cord Injury in collaboration with the University of Sydney and University of Technology.
Development of a Falls Risk Screening Tool in a Traumatic Brain Injury Population: a Two-Phase Study in collaboration with the University of Sydney.
An Exploration of the Nature and Extent of Patient Dependence in Relation to Urinary Elimination in Inpatient Rehabilitation in Australia in collaboration with the University of Sydney and Wollongong.
The Changing Face of Rehabilitation in Australia in collaboration with the University of Sydney and Wollongong.
Deteriorating Patients in Rehabilitation in collaboration with the University of Sydney.
Improving Diagnosis of Verbosity following Traumatic Brain Injury: A descriptive study in collaboration with the University of Sydney.
Exploring Food and Nutrition Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviours of Spinal Patients in Specialist Rehabilitation in collaboration with the University of Wollongong.
Factors Influencing the Overall Satisfaction in Patients with Severe Brain Injury with Physiotherapy Services during Inpatient Rehabilitation.
App based Exercise Rehabilitation Outcomes (AERO) in collaboration with Macquarie University.
The significance of Resilience on the Longer-term Wellbeing of Family Caregivers, Service Utilisation and Client Community Participation: 3 year follow up. Royal Rehab participated in this research with the Ingham Research Institute, Liverpool Brain Injury Research Group.
Recent research highlights
Duncan McKechnie, Clinical Nurse Consultant at the Brain Injury Unit, undertook four years of research and completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2017.
Duncan’s research resulted in the development of a falls risk screening tool for the traumatic brain injury population. His research has now been published in peer-reviewed journals and won him the Nursing Research Prize for his presentation at the Australian Rehabilitation Nurses’ Association national conference in Adelaide in October 2017.
Dr Joan Leung, Senior Physiotherapist at the Brain Injury Unit, is leading Dr Clayton King, Director of Medical Services, and Sarah Fereday, Professional Leader – Physiotherapy, in a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the combination of serial casting and botulinum toxin in the management of ankle contractures which is a common condition post brain injury. This study is the first in showing substantial benefits in the long-term use of such treatments.
Priya Iyer, Dietetics Professional Leader, represented Royal Rehab in 2018 at the 10th World Congress for Neurorehabilitation in Mumbai, India. Priya presented her findings from her world-first research project undertaken as part of her PhD: ‘Exploring Food and Nutrition Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviours of Spinal Patients in Specialist Rehabilitation’.
The study explored nutrition knowledge among spinal patients in light of their increased prevalence of risk factors of cardiovascular disease in people with spinal cord injury, and highlights knowledge gaps that influence food choices to examine the need for targeted intervention.
Social Worker Dr Kate Jones contributed to the development of the Strength2Strength program for families of individuals with traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury. During 2017, Kate completed a PhD through Griffith University on the contribution spirituality plays in building family resilience after spinal cord injury and her work has been widely published.
Kate’s research has shown although spirituality is an important component of adjustment after traumatic injury, it is not well incorporated into the rehabilitation process.
Kate is currently working on a research project funded by the Community of Christ which will develop and trial a training program focused on building staff knowledge, skills and confidence in relation to spiritual care.
Find out more…
We use cookies to give you the best experience of our website. We use essential non-privacy intrusive cookies which are necessary for the operation of the website as well as non-essential cookies to optimise your experience.