Dr Jackie McRae receives recognition for spinal cord injury and Covid-19 work

Published: 12 January 2022

Dr Jackie McRae, Associate Professor and Director of Research in the Centre for Allied Health at St George’s, University of London and Kingston University, has received recognition from several organisations for her work in spinal cord injury and Covid-19.

Receiving awards from expert organisations

In 2021, Dr McRae received both a Giving Voice award by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) for her work promoting speech and language therapy for Covid-19 patients, and a Spinal Research Institute's Spinal Cord Injury Research Writing Prize for her article on work to overcome swallowing and communication issues in spinal cord injury patients.

Dr McRae was nominated for the Giving Voice award following her clinical work as Lead Speech and Language Therapist at NHS Nightingale, London and University College Hospital, London for managing Covid-19 patients in intensive care. She was the lead author for the RCSLT critical care webpages, as well as part of the Covid expert panel advising on training and upskilling others who were working with Covid-19 patients. In May 2020, Dr McRae was interviewed on Good Morning Britain, reaching more than three million people, raising awareness of the RCSLT’s role in supporting people with Covid.

The Spinal Cord Injury Research Writing Prize was given to Dr McRae after writing about her own research into the acute care of people with spinal cord injuries. By surveying healthcare workers and patients with spinal cord injuries themselves, she was able to develop recommendations for providing consistent care for people with spinal cord injury who have swallowing, breathing, nutrition and communication issues.

“The next step to increase the impact of these recommendations, is wide implementation across trauma and spinal units,” she writes.” Adding that, “If our patients show early improvements in swallowing and communication, this will demonstrate the value of these recommendations and help to establish a baseline for further research into therapeutic approaches.”

Developing recommendations for spinal cord injury rehabilitation

Recently, Dr McRae has had a paper published in Disability and Rehabilitation, demonstrating the use of a screening tool to identify risk factors for swallowing difficulty in spinal cord injury patients. The study finds that earlier identification of risk and diagnosis of problems could have the potential to improve clinical outcomes.

Speaking on the paper, Dr McRae says: “There’s no standard care or care pathway for people with spinal cord injuries. Often problems are hidden and not seen and if people aren’t looked after properly, there can be complications such as chest infections and pneumonia. It’s about identifying risk factors early, delivering the correct method of assessment and targeted interventions to prevent those complications from arising.”

In the last 12 months, Dr McRae’s work has received further recognition, by being invited to join a World Health Organization spinal cord injury peer review group. As part of the role, she will be reviewing international guidance on rehabilitation programmes, with a focus on improving outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.

“Obviously in the UK we have a healthcare that is free at the point of access,” she says. “But in a lot of these countries they don't have free care. So it's part of our goal to ensure that people in these groups, who are most compromised, will have access to reliable and consistent rehabilitation.”

Upcoming work to improve patient care

Over the coming year, Dr McRae will have even more opportunities to further develop patient rehabilitation programmes. A new multi-site trial will be launched, putting in place best practice recommendations for her research so far. As well as this, Dr McRae has also been awarded an Academy of Medical Sciences Daniel Turnberg Travel Fellowship to spend a month with colleagues at the University of Haifa in Israel to explore on long term clinical management of ventilated patients.

You can find out more about Dr McRae’s work spearheading the rehabilitation of patients recovering from coronavirus at London's Nightingale Hospital in the first wave of the pandemic in our news story here.