EXPAND - EXtremities Pain Active lifestyle aNd Disability

Improvement of participation and quality of life

In general, clinical rehabilitation focuses on complex cases involving multiple co-morbidities and complications rather than on single pure pathologies. Treatment is aimed at optimizing the quality of life of disabled patients with multiple problems that cannot be solved with a single curative intervention.

Rehabilitation programmes are aimed at improving the patients’ mobility, independence to self-care, ability to communicate, and ability to live independently and engage in productive activities. Consequently, these programmes are generally based on a bio-psychosocial rather than a biomedical model.C

Clinical problems and treatment programmes Expand:

• Upper and lower extremities: amputation, prosthetics, orthotics, and disorders;
• Specific and non-specific pain syndromes, including low back pain syndromes, and work participation.

In the near future, the EXPAND research on extremities will focus on disorders of the hands and feet and on amputation of the extremities, particularly on impairments, activities, and participation.

The EXPAND research on pain will focus on chronic pain and work participation. New research projects will be focusing more on the combination of these two topics.

Implementation of research results

To reach our goal to improve the quality of life of disabled persons, an active implementation strategy of our research results is warranted. We stimulate all our researchers to make an implementation plan before or directly after starting the project. To facilitate implementation of research results, to learn about implementation steps and strategies, we would like to refer to the UMCG Toolbox for Implementation: Toolbox Implementatie (umcg.nl).