Rehabilitation Medicine Education for Clinicians
Practising rehabilitation medicine takes more than medical knowledge.
Our practical education deepens your knowledge and develops your clinical thinking to support better rehabilitation care.
Rehabilitation medicine asks us to think differently
Our patients rarely have a single diagnosis or a single problem to solve.
We care for people living with multimorbidity, disability and the consequences of illness or injury over long periods of their lives.
Our role extends beyond treating disease and impairment. We need to understand how these affect function and participation, and how psychological, social and environmental factors influence recovery and the way a person lives their life.
This requires a broad clinical knowledge of medicine, exercise and physiological adaptation; an understanding of cognition, behaviour and learning; and the ability to use education, functional retraining and adaptation to improve performance and participation.
It also requires frameworks that bring this information together, allowing us to manage uncertainty, identify barriers to recovery and make thoughtful, patient-centred clinical decisions.
And because rehabilitation is delivered through teams, communication, collaboration and leadership are fundamental skills. As our careers develop, our professional identity, self-awareness and ability to lead others become increasingly important parts of rehabilitation practice.
Rehabilitation Medicine Gold helps develop the broader aspects of rehabilitation medicine — the thinking, knowledge and skills that support great clinical practice.
Rehabilitation Medicine Gold
Rehabilitation Medicine Gold
Rehabilitation Medicine Gold is a free weekly email exploring the knowledge, clinical reasoning and practical skills that underpin rehabilitation medicine. Each issue develops useful frameworks for clinical decision-making, communication, professional development and leadership.
Grounded in Rehabilitation Medicine Research
The Rehabilitation Medicine Group was founded by Dr Nathan Johns in 2013 as a private multidisciplinary rehabiliation medicine practice. In 2025 it developed into this online platform to deliver online patient programs and clinician education.
Our patient programs and clinician education are grounded in Dr Nathan Johns’ 25 years of clinical experience, PhD thesis and research, peer-reviewed publications and ongoing work translating rehabilitation medicine into practical education.
Dr Johns’ PhD entitled “Redesigning rehabilitation to treat persistent post-surgical pain” has been developed into the patient programs Kneed and Spined and forms the basis for clinician education.
Guided rehabilitation programs for patients
These digital patient programs are designed for people with persistent pain. They allow people without access to formal rehabilitation to participate in evidence-based programs at home. They aim to reduce pain by developing self-management skills and using strategies to improve function and particpation.
They can be used independently or parallel to clinical care to support clinicians in explaining and reframing pain, in developing safe exercise plans, in medication management, goal setting, sleep and relaxation.
Kneed is a digital pain rehabilitation program for people with persistent pain post-knee replacement. Kneed is our foundational program researched in a pilot randomised controlled trial. This self-management program guides patients through pain and medication education, exercises, stress reduction and desensitisation (motor imagery). Information is easy to understand and presented as video, audio and quizzes.
Spined is a digital pain rehabilitation program for people with persistent non-surgical back pain and for those with persistent pain following spinal surgery. Spined has been adapted from Kneed. Pain and medication education allow participants to make sense of, and utilise, exercise, stress reduction and skill development with easy to understand information, video, audio and quizzes.
Coming Soon - Kneed 4 Clinicians
As demonstrated at the Rehabilitation Medicine Society of Australia and New Zealand Annual Scientific Meeting (RMSANZ 2026 in Darwin in July), Kneed4Clinicians is being developed to help clinicians explain and manage persistent pain after knee replacement using a rehabilitation medicine framework.
It adapts the Kneed program into an AI-supported clinician education program, with pain education, consultation language, clinical reasoning, quizzes and practical communication tools.
