Dr Jillian Eyles APAM is a physiotherapist and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow in the Osteoarthritis Clinical Research Group, Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, Kolling Institute, University of Sydney. 

Her main focus is on supporting health professionals to deliver osteoarthritis care that is recommended in clinical practice guidelines and educating consumers to ask for the care that is most appropriate for them. 

‘I’ve worked as an implementation scientist in osteoarthritis, back pain and other musculoskeletal conditions so I’ve seen how many consumers will not want to take lifestyle interventions on board. 

'They’d prefer to be given a pill or have an injection or surgery.

'But we know there are many other things we can do to manage their chronic musculoskeletal conditions. 

‘Associate Professor Michelle Hall now works at the University of Sydney. 

'At the University of Melbourne she’d been working on some trials in exercise and weight management in hip and knee osteoarthritis. 

'She had spoken to consumers and asked, “Is there anything else we’re not asking you about? What else is important in the picture?” 

'And they said, “Nobody ever talks to us about sleep.”’ 

The research, ‘Targeting insomnia to transform chronic musculoskeletal pain management’, is a joint project bringing together over two dozen researchers from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, the UK and the US across the fields of physiotherapy, psychology, rheumatology, biomechanics, pain biology, sleep, statistics and health policy. 

It was recently successful in obtaining a grant of more than $4.7 million from the Medical Research Future Fund. 

‘Our plan is to use cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) as an intervention for sleep in people who have insomnia or some insomnia symptoms as well as back pain or hip or knee osteoarthritis. 

'CBT-I is an intervention often delivered by psychologists but as experts in musculoskeletal conditions, physiotherapists are well placed to deliver it. 

'We will go through the CBT-I intervention with a fine-tooth comb with physios and consumers to work out if it’s acceptable the way it is or if it needs to be tweaked to make it a better fit to the physiotherapy context. 

'Three of the team—Dr Sam Bunzli, Dr Pete Window and Dr Rob Schutze—are currently refining the CBT-I intervention so it’s suitable for physios, then my work will be to develop and evaluate materials to train the physios to deliver CBI-I in practice.’ 

The trial is expected to take around four years to complete. 

Upcoming stages include co-adapting CBT-I, upskilling physiotherapists, enrolling participants for the trial to assess effectiveness, assessing cost-effectiveness and conducting nested mechanistic studies and a trial process evaluation. 

‘The basket trial design is really innovative in that we’re testing CBI-I across three conditions—back pain, hip and knee osteoarthritis— at the same time so that we can answer three different questions about insomnia and pain simultaneously, without needing to do three separate trials. 

'We’re hoping to compare in-person CBT-I training with e-learning as well. 

'Then we’ll be looking at the best way to provide physiotherapists with credentials to say that they’ve got the right skills to deliver this intervention.’ 

Jillian is currently looking for potential physiotherapy PhD students who would be interested in joining the team. 

Email Jillian here for more information.