Much of what a rehabilitation hospital does today, from robotic gait training to standardised outcome scores, came out of a small number of research centers funded by the US government since the 1970s. Knowing how that system is organised helps patients and clinicians find current evidence.
NIDILRR and the RRTCs
The National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), part of the Administration for Community Living since 2014, funds Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers (RRTCs). Each center holds a five-year grant for one theme, for example ageing with a disability, employment, or community living after brain injury, and must combine research with training of professionals and dissemination to the public. Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) do the same for technology: wheelchairs, prosthetics, communication devices, accessible information technology.
Model systems
The Spinal Cord Injury Model Systems (since 1970), the Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems (since 1987) and the Burn Model Systems are networks of hospitals that follow patients for decades in shared databases. The SCI database alone holds records on tens of thousands of people, and its findings on life expectancy, secondary conditions and employment underpin nearly every clinical guideline in the field. The Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center turns the results into plain-language factsheets.
Other funders
The National Institutes of Health fund basic and clinical rehabilitation science through the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research; the Department of Veterans Affairs runs its own rehabilitation research and development service, with a strong focus on prosthetics and blast injury; the Department of Defense funds brain injury research; and private foundations such as the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation support spinal cord injury work. In Europe and Canada national health research councils play the same role.
How to use it
Patients looking for trials can search ClinicalTrials.gov by condition. Clinicians and students find training through the RRTCs’ webinars and the model systems’ factsheets, which are free. A hospital with an active research programme tends to adopt new methods first, which is a reasonable factor when choosing where to be treated.
This site is an independent reference on rehabilitation medicine.
