The theme of the Tampa VA Research Center of Excellence is maximizing rehabilitation outcomes. Research focuses on veterans with disabilities, service men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and older adults.

Goals

• Advance the science of rehabilitation by combining traditional health services outcomes (e.g., patient safety, quality of life, access, healthcare utilization, and cost) with rehabilitation outcomes (e.g., function, activity, and community participation).
• Promote early detection and treatment of polytrauma including subtle, delayed-onset, and overlapping symptoms.
• Develop tools for screening, risk assessment, and outcome measurement in rehabilitation settings of care.
• Become a national resource to Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) and Rehabilitation Research and Development (RR&D) in the areas of Polytrauma rehabilitation, rehabilitation outcomes, and patient safety for veterans with disabilities.
• Train a new generation of investigators to address the conceptual, methodological, and analytical issues necessary to advance the science in rehabilitation outcomes.

Facility Resources

The center is located in a new 30,000 sq ft building. In the past 10 years, we developed a comprehensive network of nine rehabilitation research labs including:

• Dynamic Human Motion Analysis Lab
• Engineering Research/Fabrication Lab
• Treadmill Lab (biomechanics of falls)
• Gait and Balance Lab I
• Gait and Balance Lab II
• Locomotor Training Lab
• Sharps Safety Research Lab
• Non-Invasive Skin Perfusion and Ischemia Detection Lab
• Advanced Prosthetics Lab

Rehabilitation at the Tampa VA

The Tampa VA has one of the largest and most respected rehabilitation programs in the VHA. These clinical programs offer access to a large patient population for research. Clinicians from these areas serve as PI and Co-I on studies and the clinical programs serve as feeders and sites for our research trainee programs. The SCI and Rehabilitation Services are supported by the USF Rehabilitation Residency Program, SCI Medicine Fellowship, and a Post-Residency Advanced Fellowship Program in SCI Medicine. Tampa’s Comprehensive Rehabilitation Program is the only VA facility with CARF accreditation in five programs, and it has been recognized as a Clinical Program of Excellence for over 12 years. We are the only VA in the country whose program evaluation system has been benchmarked with private sector rehabilitation programs for 20+ years. Some of the programs include:

• Polytrauma and Blast Rehabilitation
• Traumatic Brain Injury Program
• SCI Program
• Amputee Program
• Pain Rehabilitation Program
• Geriatric Rehabilitation Program
• Academic Affiliations

The University of South Florida is the 9th largest university in the country, and designated as a Research Level I institution. We have collaborations with faculty and students from the Colleges of Medicine, Physical Therapy, Public Health, Nursing, Behavioral & Community Science, Business, Education and Psychology and Engineering.

Research Consortia

We lead four research consortia:

• Falls
• Wandering
• Safe Patient Handling
• Polytrauma

with two new consortia in development:

• SCI Pressure Ulcers
• Amputee Outcomes

Each consortium is composed of expert clinicians and researchers from VA, DoD, and academia. A research agenda is developed, and members collaborate to conduct and disseminate research. We are also one of the nine VA sites funded through the Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research. The vision of the CHIR is to conduct research that will allow computer algorithms to replace manual chart review as the preferred method to unlock the information contained within text-based data in the electronic health record.

To Contact Us:
8900 Grand Oak Circle
Tampa, FL 33637-1022
Phone: 813-558-3902 or 813-558-3911

Director: Gail Powell-Cope, PhD, RN, FAAN
Gail.Powell-Cope@va.gov

To download a fact sheet about out Center Staff click here.

For further information on the activities of VA Research:

Health Services Research and Development Service