Academic rehabilitation was set up at King’s College London in 2001 with an endowment from the Dunhill Medical Trust. Professor Lynne Turner-Stokes has been the Herbert Dunhill Chair of Rehabilitation since.

Professor Turner-Stokes is also a consultant in Rehabilitation Medicine and Director of the Regional Hyper-acute Rehabilitation Unit (RHRU) at Northwick Park Hospital. The RHRU provides a tertiary specialist rehabilitation service for younger adult patients with severe complex disabilities, mainly resulting from acquired brain injury. The RHRU acts as a central focus for research and training for all professionals involved in rehabilitation and has a national and international reputation as a leading service in the field of neurological rehabilitation.

Lynne is Director of the UK Rehabilitation Outcomes Collaborative (UKROC), which provides the national clinical registry database for specialist rehabilitation in the UK and is commissioned by NHS England to provide national benchmarking on quality and outcomes for all specialist Level 1 and 2 Rehabilitation services in England.

Working with the Department of Health and NHS England/Improvement, the British Society of Rehabilitation Medicine (BSRM) and the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), Lynne has played a crucial role in the development of national policy for rehabilitation through several key national leadership roles over the last two decades. She has chaired and led a number of groups that have led to significant changes in policy and health service delivery, including:

• The National Service Framework for Long Term Conditions 2005
• BSRM Research and Clinical Standards Committee 2003-2013 and Guidelines Development Lead 2003
• Expert Reference panel for development of casemix and tariffs in rehabilitation Rehabilitation 2009
• NHS England Clinical Reference Group for Specialised Rehabilitation 2012-2016.
• RCP Guideline Development Groups for Spasticity in Adults 2008- and Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness 2013-

Professor Turner-Stokes is the Chief Investigator for the Upper Limb International Spasticity (ULIS) programme, which is a 10-year series of sizeable international cohort studies conducted across over 20 countries on four continents to describe real-life clinical practice in the management of spasticity. She also led the National Clinical Audit for Specialist rehabilitation following Major Trauma (NCASRI)

Lynne is also on the editorial board of Clinical Rehabilitation and Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine and was editor of the Concise Clinical Guidelines for Clinical Medicine series.

Research interests

Professor Turner-Stokes has over 200 peer-reviewed publications. Her principal research interests are in Health Services Research, gathering the evidence to inform effective and cost-efficient health services provision in rehabilitation for people with long-term neurological conditions.

Research techniques include:

• Systematic literature reviews (including Cochrane and other methodologies)
• Analysis of large prospective longitudinal cohort data sets to explore the effectiveness of complex interventions
• Development and evaluation of outcome measures for patients with complex neurological disability
• Casemix development encompassing the evaluation of rehabilitation needs and interventions, to identify gaps in service provision
• Development of techniques for application of patient-level costing and evaluation of cost efficiency in complex disability

Further information

• King's research profile
• Publons profile
• Orchid profile