The Cerebral Palsy Research Network (CPRN) Executive Committee Member, Unni Narayanan, MD, of SickKids Hospital in Toronto, Ontario Canada, has been awarded funds to support research to enhance patient/clinician interactions to improve patient outcomes in cerebral palsy (CP).   The award from the Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (SPOR) program at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is to support a shared decision-making framework to enhance patient/clinician decision making and goal setting prior to surgical interventions for CP. 

Dr. Narayanan will be joined by several Co-Investigators from CPRN including Laurie Glader, MD at Boston Children’s Hospital, Paul Gross at the University of Utah, Garey Noritz, MD at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Brandon Rocque, MD at Children’s Alabama.  The team will work to build tools based on Dr. Narayanan’s outcome measures for children with CP who are ambulatory called the Gait Outcome Assessment List (GOAL) and for children with CP that are not ambulatory called the Caregiver Priorities & Child Health Index of Life with Disabilities (CPCHILD).  The tools will generate targeted guidance for caregivers and clinicians to plan surgical interventions.  These tools will be available in the participating clinics and on CPRN’s community web portal MyCP.  The study hypothesizes that parents, children and clinicians will be more satisfied with outcomes when interventions are based on caregiver and child goals for improvement.