Report from Atlanta, Georgia – ACRM 2017
I’ve been at the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) Conference in Atlanta, USA, this week. My main reason for going was to promote the work of Cochrane Rehabilitation to our North American colleagues. However, I also had the opportunity of collaborating with a great group of academics and clinicians from the US for a half-day pre-conference workshop on self-management training in rehabilitation. (This group included Veronica T. Rowe, PhD, OTR/L – University of Central Arkansas; Jeanne Langan, PT, PhD – University of Buffalo; Marsha Neville, OT, PhD – Texas Woman’s University; Shelley Dean, OTD, OTR/L – Crossway Pediatric Therapy; Candice Osborne, PhD, MPH, OTR – University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.)
The conference was massive, with over 2000 attendees. However, as many as 29 different conference streams could be running at the same time. As a presenter this meant you could quite easily get lost in the crowd, and end up travelling half way around to the world to speak to just a handful of people. Fortunately, the 75 minute symposium on the work of Cochrane Rehabilitation sparked a bit of interest, and I had a good turnout from an engaged audience – many of whom had extensive experience in systematic reviews and clinical guidelines.
I also had the opportunity to meet with a few key people in ACRM:
- Dr Ron Seel, Evidence and Practice Committee Chair at ACRM
- Prof Marcel Dijkers, Research Professor from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and lead on a current (massive!) guideline on traumatic brain injury rehabilitation, funded by the Brain Injury Association of America.
- Prof Allen Heinemann, Co-Chief-Editor of Arch Phys Med Rehab
There was a lot of interest in the potential for collaboration between ACRM and Cochrane Rehabilitation. ACRM is already highly involved in systematic review and guidelines work – some of which they externally contract. ACRM has an established relationship with the Campbell Collaboration – which is another excellent, but somewhat newer group than Cochrane, which also publishes systematic reviews but with more of a focus on the social sciences. The main objective for both ACRM and Cochrane Rehabilitation at this stage is to find out about what each group is working on, so that can we work in synergy and avoid unnecessary duplication of activities. Incidentally, much of the guideline work in America ends up in their National Guidelines Clearinghouse, which is a good resource to search when looking for such material. Going forward, Cochrane Rehabilitation and the Evidence and Practice Committee of ACRM are aiming to maintain closer communications about events and activities that we get involved in. Some initial discussion was held about possibly running a collaborative symposium at the ACRM conference in Chicago, 2019.
I also attended a great series of presentations by Tessa Hart, John Whyte, and colleagues about the Rehabilitation Treatment Taxomony, which has now been renamed the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS). I had wondered about the possibility of using this taxonomy in the context of my work with Cochrane Rehabilitation – attempting to identify and classify all rehabilitation-relevant Cochrane reviews. However, the taxonomy is not quite at the stage where it is actually a classification system yet. Hart, Whyte and colleagues have completed some really interesting work to develop a framework for such a taxonomy in the future, but have yet to operationalise this framework into standardised classification system. Nonetheless, the RTSS already has some direct application to treatment description, and a lot to offer in terms of teaching clinical reasoning in the context of rehabilitation – something that I would be interested into introducing into our teaching material at RTRU.
My slides from the Cochrane Rehabilitation symposium: ACRM 2017 – Cochrane Rehab Symposium Slides
