Embracing innovations in spinal cord injury care: The Canadian experience

Since 2012, we have collaborated with the Canadian community of spinal cord injury professionals to disseminate their advances in care and research to the larger community of clinicians and researchers. This supplement features contributions to the Canadian Spinal Cord Injury – Rehabilitation Association’s (CSCI-RA) 9th National Spinal Cord Injury Conference: Innovations in Care, a virtual event scheduled for November 16–18, 2021. It is the fifth consecutive Canadian conference issue published by the Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine (JSCM). Editorial content centers on a broad-based perspective on ‘innovations in care’, curated by CSCI-RA guest editors B. Catharine Craven, MD, and Kristin Musselman, PhD, from the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, University Health Network in Toronto, Ontario.

Advances achieved in Canada are influencing other societies striving for equitable standards for the care of individuals with spinal cord injury. One example is the series of articles published in the 2019 supplement – 8th National Spinal Cord Injury Conference: Sex, Gender, and the Health of Women. This series summarized the SCI-HIGH project (Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Care High Performance Indicators Project), which prioritized the domains of rehabilitative care based on clinical importance and feasibility. Addressing nine domains, these articles maintain their prominence among JSCM’s most downloaded articles of all time, providing fundamental guidance for targeting quality care for a diverse population of people with spinal cord injury.¹

Citation data provide additional evidence for influence in the field. For example, JSCM’s most cited article² was published in 2017 in the special issue for the 7th National Canadian Spinal Cord Injury Conference: Military Medicine & Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation-Novel Intersections. Although the Canadian community is relatively small, their influence clearly is not.

The 2021 supplement illustrates the ongoing commitment of our Canadian colleagues to using biological and clinical evidence to shape clinical practice, meeting the challenges of standardizing quality of care across a small number of care centers dispersed throughout the nation’s large geographical area. To maximize impact, the entire supplement is open access, ensuring access by the global community. Highlighting the theme of ‘innovations in care’ are articles on award-winning research,^3.4 the conference keynote address,⁵ and the 2021 Champion of Change Award,⁶ a tradition that honors a Canadian professional who has changed the fabric of the spinal cord injury community. We anticipate that future journal metrics will reflect the engagement of our readership with the range of relevant topics in this issue.

For almost a decade, JSCM has facilitated dissemination of the contributions of the CSCI-RA biennial conference to spinal cord injury research and care. This year, we also shared the excitement of the Ernest Bors, MD Award for Scientific Development. This competitive publishing award, sponsored by JSCM and the Academy of Spinal Cord Injury Professionals, was awarded to a Canadian postdoctoral fellow for a novelstudy of leisure time physical activity and life satisfaction among individuals living with spinal cord injury.⁷

In the spirit of the Bors Award and the 9th National Spinal Cord Injury Conference, we encourage our readership to embrace innovation – in health care policy, focus on underserved populations, technology, data collection, research design, and implementation science – that will transform the futures of individuals with spinal cord injury and their care partners.