Research question / In development
Rehabilitation
beyond the clinic.
How can people living far from specialist services—including herding communities in Inner Mongolia and Mongolia—receive timely rehabilitation after hip replacement?
A long journey
for routine care.
Returning to a city for repeated appointments can be difficult when home is far from a rehabilitation service. The research question begins with that practical problem: how can recovery be supported at home, with clinical contact at the right time?
We are exploring how home exercise, simple digital follow-up and targeted clinician support could fit together. The aim is to shape a model of care around daily life and meaningful recovery.
Three questions guiding the work
Access. Recovery.
The work of care.
Select a question to see what we want to investigate.
Which parts of rehabilitation can happen at home?
How should home exercise, asynchronous follow-up and direct clinician contact be combined after hip replacement? Which decisions need a visit, and which can be supported between appointments?
What should remote follow-up measure?
Can a brief assessment of pain and everyday function help identify people whose recovery needs closer review? We want follow-up to capture what someone can do in daily life as well as how they feel.
Who does the work?
How do different ways of delivering care affect travel, clinician time, exercise time and family support alongside functional recovery? Fewer appointments can change where the work happens.
Start with
existing evidence.
Public datasets and existing rehabilitation trials offer a starting point. We are mapping which questions their populations, outcomes and follow-up schedules can answer, and where evidence from local clinical practice will be needed.
The next step is to define focused comparisons and outcomes for a study. This is a developing research direction, shaped by the practical challenges of delivering rehabilitation at a distance.
Build the question
with clinicians.
Clinicians working with remote communities can help identify where follow-up breaks down, which decisions are difficult at a distance and what patients need after discharge. Those observations can define a research question worth testing.
Develop a question together