Alison Rushton
Alison Rushton brings a strong background in translational research in spinal pain to CANSpine. Spinal pain is the leading health condition requiring effective management. Low value care, inefficient and fractured care pathways, and lack of a person-centred approach contribute to high health and economic costs in Canada and internationally. Current management practices of spinal pain strongly contribute to the growing use of opioids and a one size fits all approach does not work.
To better manage spinal pain, an urgent need for comprehensive assessment to inform precision interventions exists. Comprehensive 360° assessment of the multiple dimensions of spinal pain, including physical measures (e.g., strength, daily activity) and biomarkers (e.g., inflammatory markers) is required. Unique and innovative combinations of measures will identify factors important to patient outcomes, mechanisms of spinal pain and inform precision rehabilitation and surgical interventions.
Physically located at Victoria Hospital, Alison is developing and validating new assessment protocols which offer new opportunities to objectively characterize the presentation of patients presenting with musculoskeletal pain of spinal origin. As a result, this enables appropriate identification of patient-specific safe targeted interventions. Effective targeted rehabilitation can enable improved effectiveness (clinical and cost) as it identifies which patients to target with specific rehabilitation approaches, and therefore enables more effective use of rehabilitation resources. The process of developing effective targeted rehabilitation is lengthy and requires several stages to ensure rigour and applicability / translation to practice. Advanced physiotherapy practice and advanced clinical reasoning are essential to delivery of precision rehabilitation.
