2025 WCHRI Summer Student

From patient to researcher: A new perspective on pediatric rehabilitation

Amy Wenzel’s personal journey recovering from a nerve injury sparked her research interest in pediatric rehabilitation. Her project aims to shorten the time it takes for new scientific discoveries to be used in hospitals and clinics, a process that currently takes an average of 17 years.

She is applying the new field of implementation science to pediatric rehabilitation, and reviewing existing studies on children’s rehabilitation to identify common factors that either help or hinder the adoption of new therapies. By categorizing them, she hopes to create a guide that will help physical and occupational therapists implement new research into practice more quickly and effectively.

“One thing my supervisor has stressed is to always connect research back to the real children and families it’s meant to help. It’s easy to get caught up in numbers and statistics, but remembering the human side keeps the work meaningful.”

Goals:

• Find and summarize the most common factors that affect the use of new therapies.
• Categorize these factors using a scientific framework to better understand them.
• Share this knowledge with health-care professionals to help them adopt new research faster.

Potential impact: This research has the potential to significantly reduce the gap between discovering new physical and occupational therapies and actually using them to help children.

Supervisor: Lesley Pritchard, professor, Department of Physical Therapy, Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine

Funder: Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation

Interested in doing research to improve the health of women and/or children? Read more about WCHRI’s training awards for students at all levels and generous grants for researchers.