The RCH Gait Laboratory is a world leader in the analysis of walking disorders in children, and is one of the many projects funded by philanthropy at the hospital. Using state of the art equipment, the highly specialist staff are able to determine why children walk the way they do, and use this to develop the best possible to treatment plan for each child.

The Impact of Giving: The Gait Lab

My name’s Pam and I’m a senior physiotherapist and the manager of the Gait Analysis Laboratory at the Royal Children’s Hospital.

The majority of children we see are children with neurodevelopmental disabilities, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, and other related conditions.

What we do is measure how children walk. We use three-dimensional gait analysis so that we can get a computerised picture of how they walk.

The gait analysis team which consists of physios and biomedical engineers analyse the data through the computer and then we put it all together with our physical measurements and that’s discussed at our reporting meeting on a Friday morning with all our surgeons and the rest of our team.

I think the most rewarding part of my work is the challenge because every child that we assess is different so you have to look at the data and marry it up with what the child does and what’s important for them and what their goals are in life so that everything that we do is different for its child

I’d really like to thank you for your generosity and support of the hospital because this makes a real difference to the lives of children that we see and also going into the future for those children that we have yet to see.