Abstract
Early in her career, Coralie English quickly realized that while the space around a patient in a rehabilitation setting is a hive of activity, the person themselves do very little: cognitively, physically, and socially.
Training as a physiotherapist, Coralie found her interests led to stroke rehabilitation, and she began to ask questions about the best way to help people recover after stroke. It wasn’t long after her clinical career began at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and she embraced stroke research.
Associate Professor Julie Bernhardt, head of the Stroke Division at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, and the principal investigator of the A Very Early Rehabilitation Trial (AVERT) whose results were released in April 2015, has been an important mentor and influence.
I introduced myself to her, early on at a conference and she really took me under her wing, and has given me strategic career advice and advice on work life balance. I don’t think I’d be where I am today in my career without Julie’s support. Now, I’m mentoring others, and the first thing I say to them, it’s really important to cultivate mentors from lots of different aspects of the field, to advise you on the myriad of decisions you need to make and where you should be spending your time.
The CIRCUIT trial (results published in IJS http://wso.sagepub.com/content/10/4/594.full) was initially a PhD project that developed, with the support of Susan Hiller, into a multicentre trial, looking at different models of physiotherapy care. Support from Dr. Bernhardt, with her experience in large clinical rehab trials; Leonie Seagal, health economist; and Maria Crotty, rehab specialist, was essential.
It all starts with an important clinical question… We ended up being able to run the trial at five rehab centres in three states across Australia. And the trial has been a springboard for invitations to speak at conferences and to meet with national and international experts.
I’m also a part of the Vista collaboration, a repository of trial data, which looks at secondary analysis of trial data; I’m particularly involved in the rehab component.
Coralie’s postdoctoral Fellowship from the NHMRC, with collaborations between The Florey and University of South Australia was focused on understanding the impact of sedentary behavior and light intensity physical activity on the health of stroke survivors.
We really wanted to understand what it would mean if we increased physical activity at the lighter end of the intensity spectrum, just getting people to move around a little more each day and understand what that might mean, and the possible effects on cerebrovascular health.
Coralie recently took up a new appointment as Associate Professor, Physiotherapy at the University of Newcastle, joining the dynamic stroke recovery team based at the Hunter Medical Research Institute, as well as initiating and building a focused team to work on her own research pathway.
I was fortunate enough to secure a National Stroke Foundation Seeding Grant earlier in the year, which has enabled us to set up a trial that will be the first of its kind to investigate the acute effects of prolonged sitting versus breaking up sitting time with light activity breaks.