Improving access to neurorehabilitation with a new toolkit

A toolkit created by a University of Toronto professor and her team will help rehabilitation therapists incorporate Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) into clinical practice for patients with spinal cord injury, stroke and other neurological conditions. 

“This toolkit is designed to give therapists an option to learn about FES through a self-directed resource,” says Kristin Musselman, an associate professor of physical therapy at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine. “It was created to be a resource that hospitals, clinics or individual therapists with no previous training on FES can pick up, follow a program, and begin using FES in their treatment.” 

Functional Electrical Stimulation promotes neuroplasticity, and can help people who have experienced a neurological injury to increase the intensity of their rehabilitation by creating more intense muscle contractions.

The technology has long been recommended in stroke and spinal cord injury rehabilitation — the evidence for its benefits date back to 1961 — but it is not commonly used in neurorehabilitation in Canada. Research shows that of more than a dozen interventions included in Canadian stroke practice guidelines, FES is the least common.

This comes down to therapists’ lack of hands-on practice with the intervention, says Musselman, who is also a scientist with the neural engineering and therapeutics team at KITE, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute at University Health Network.

Musselman has been training therapists from around the world on the benefits of FES and how they can incorporate it into their practice, but she says there was a need to train more therapists, efficiently. She hopes the toolkit will lead to FES becoming more available to people who are living with neurological injury or disease. 

Mussleman and her colleagues created the toolkit with researchers, educators, clinicians and people living with neurological conditions with funding from Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Paralyzed Veterans of America. 

Therapists looking to access the toolkit can download it for free here.