Physiotherapy is the most popular primary healthcare choice in Australia and other developed countries, with reports of good patient satisfaction for people with acute and chronic conditions.

Despite emerging research activity and developments, major gaps in the evidence base of physiotherapy care remain.

Worldwide, most physiotherapy research undertaken is initiated locally by researchers or clinicians, and recruitment of sufficient numbers of participants remains difficult.

Collaborations between researchers, clinicians and patients in a practice-based research network (PBRN) would overcome this problem by building a research platform and infrastructure.

PBRNs act as ‘research laboratories’, systematically enabling researchers to answer questions arising from clinical practice that are relevant to clinicians as well as patients.

Aim of CAPRI

CAPRI is the first national and sustainable research network program focused on physiotherapy, worldwide.

It aims to facilitate and coordinate high-quality practice-based, patient-centred physiotherapy research, with effective engagement of physiotherapists.

It is designed to help grow the evidence-base and research capacity in Australian physiotherapy, and aims to facilitate research activity to improve physiotherapy care and patient outcomes.

CAPRI has the capacity to generate long-lasting knowledge on a wide variety of physiotherapy-related topics.

This knowledge can enhance healthcare by improving the evidence base of the profession, provide insight into addressing social and cultural inequity, and help the APA make important healthcare and policy decisions.

How does CAPRI work?

CAPRI is a PBRN based on a sub-study model. This means data collection is focused exclusively on practitioner (physiotherapist) data via self-report (online survey), to establish a practitioner database.

The CAPRI website and infrastructure was launched in December 2020 and we have been recruiting physiotherapists since then.

We aim to recruit as many practising physiotherapists across Australia and New Zealand as possible. You can fill in an online questionnaire about your practice and you, as a practitioner. 

This data will enable us to answer study questions related to practice and practitioner data (frequencies).

In addition, participating physiotherapists receive an invitation to take part in CAPRI sub-studies (using a consent form).

When physiotherapists consent, their data will be added to a secure database, which will be used as an ongoing resource for further research.

Independent researchers and/or clinicians can use this database to carry out future research.

They will be able to apply to conduct a nested sub-study in the CAPRI database via an expression of interest to the steering committee.

These expressions of interest will follow a peer-reviewed process, ensuring that the study question is relevant, the method is of high quality and the study is feasible.

In this phase, attention will be paid to maintaining and updating the CAPRI database to ensure it will be an ongoing resource for research and for research-capacity building.

Who is involved?

CAPRI is hosted by the Discipline of Physiotherapy, Graduate School of Health, UTS (Prof Arianne Verhagen). It was developed in collaboration with the Faculty of Health at UTS (Prof Jon Adams and Prof David Sibbritt), which has much experience in developing and maintaining PBRNs.

The current steering committee is Prof Arianne Verhagen (Head of Discipline, Physiotherapy, UTS), Prof Jon Adams and Prof David Sibbritt (Faculty of Health, UTS), Assoc Prof Taryn Jones (Macquarie University), Dr Andrew Lever (Sydney University), Dr Poonam Mehta (Discipline of Physiotherapy, UTS), Rik Dawson (APA representative), Fiona Scott (consumer representative), and Libby Soderholm (private practitioners representative). 

The advisory board consists of representatives of other physiotherapy courses in Australia and New Zealand.

Email CAPRI@uts.edu.au for further details, or visit the website to get involved.