Column
This month I visited the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Washington DC. I was hosted by Dr Gerben DeJong, who is the Director of the Centre for Post-Acute Studies at the NRH. Primarily I was over in the US to link up with the researchers at NRH and to present at the 2010 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and American Society of Neurorehabilitation Joint Education Conference, which was held in Montreal, but it was also an excellent chance to have a look around one of America's top rehabilitation facilities.
In comparison to hospitals in New Zealand, the NRH is blessed with the kinds of resources that we can only dream about: e.g. the Lokomat (a robotic exoskeleton for gait retraining), the ARMin (a robotic arms that interacts with virtual environments for upper limb retraining), several versions of the ZeroG (a dynamic body-weight support system for over-ground gait training), and lush artificial living environments for practicing everyday home and community activities.
But don't just read about it, check out the video I've posted on YouTube to share with you the facilities available at the NRH. (Just click the underlined blue text to view the video.)
Incidentally, for my presentation at the 2010 ACRM-ASNR Joint Education Conference I was joined by Dr Gerben DeJong as well as Jo Fadyl and Prof Kath McPherson (AUT University, NZ), and Rebecca Gewurtz (McMasters University, Canada) to deliver a symposium on the role of qualitative metasynthesis in evidence based rehabilitation (but that's another story). My thanks go to the Wellington Medicial Research Foundation and University of Otago who provide financial support for my travel and accommodation.
William Levack
