The National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC), in collaboration with the University of Leeds and Itecho Health, has secured a £300,000 Innovate UK grant to develop and deploy a digital rehabilitation platform to be used across rehabilitation pathways across the country.
The NRC is a 70-bed, state-of-the-art specialist rehabilitation centre, for NHS patients who have experienced a life-changing illness or injury which opened on 2 September and is run and staffed by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH).
The digital platform aims to help both clinicians and academics understand patients’ rehabilitation needs, monitor outcomes, support more personalised care, and enable rehabilitation services to make better use of patient-reported data.
The grant will enable the project team to develop and deploy what is known as a ‘patient-reported outcomes’ (PROMs) platform. This platform will enable the implementation and feasibility testing of a core set of national rehabilitation measures across a range of rehabilitation services.
The development of the core set is currently underway at NRC, and the platform will host it for testing across several other NHS services.
The digital platform is expected to be ready for testing in 2027. The wider project team will undertake further technical development of the platform and psychometric evaluation of the PROM data to ensure that the measures and the platform are robust, meaningful and fit-for-purpose across different rehabilitation populations, conditions and services.
Professor Manoj Sivan, Clinical Research Lead for the NRC and Academic Lead for the KTP project, said:
“This project is particularly important because more than half of people with complex rehabilitation needs in this country currently have no access to rehabilitation services.
“We need smart, scalable tools that can capture a patient’s rehabilitation needs and progress through existing pathways, while also generating the evidence needed to inform the development of rehabilitation services nationally.”
The NRC would like to thank Innovate UK and the KTP programme for supporting this important collaboration. We look forward to working with University of Leeds, Itecho Health and our NHS partners to improve access to rehabilitation and transform how rehabilitation needs and outcomes are understood across the country.