ACICR 2007 -2008 Annual Report Addendum - Alberta Centre for ...

Leah Phillips (PhD) - Injured workers at risk of poor recovery. Who recovers?
Who doesn’t?
Background
Goals
Objectives
Seeks to identify potentially modifiable psychosocial prognostic factors for
recovery in a treatment group of injured workers at a Rehabilitation Center.
This work will focus on pain coping strategies in injured workers. Recent
research has identified pain coping as one of the strongest prognostic factors in
recovery from neck pain in the general population, and has also shown to be
important in recovery after a whiplash injury. Yet, there is scarce research in
understanding pain coping in an occupational cohort.
The goals of this work are two fold to gain (1) an understanding of the
prognostic role of pain coping on recovery from a work related injury (Phase I);
and to (2) develop an understanding of the experience of coping from the
workers’ perspectives, e.g., how these individuals cope with their pain, how
they form pain coping strategies and what reasoning they give for using these
strategies (Phase II).
The primary objective of this work is to decrease the burden of occupational
injury. If pain coping shows to be a predictive factor for recovery in this group
of workers, it is a reasonable target for interventions, while the qualitative
work will provide much more information about how to intervene in coping,
and who to intervene with.
A secondary research objective is the exploration of the efficacy of the
treatment program by examining and comparing three distinct outcome
measures used by the rehabilitation center.
Status
A full proposal has been drafted. Ethics documentation for this project is
currently being prepared.
Partners & Sponsors • Dr. Linda Carroll, Dr. Peter Rothe, Dr. Don Voaklander, Dr. Doug Grosse
(supervisory committee)
• Millard Health Rehabilitation Center, Edmonton, Alberta.
Contact
Dr. Linda Carroll, Associate Professor
Phone: (780) 492-9767
Email: linda.carroll@ualberta.ca
Alberta Centre for Injury Control & Research Page 55 of 66 Annual Report Addendum 2007/2008