Body
Jane Duff grew up in England in a family of social workers. Her father had originally trained in London to become a policeman but an inherited hearing disability worsened, forcing him to give up his dream. Duff’s father decided to further his education when she was an infant and received his qualification in social work. “My sense of real pride in his achievements comes from that,” says Duff, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in the United Kingdom who specializes in working with people with spinal cord injuries (SCI) at the National Spinal Injuries Centre, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust in Aylesbury. “He didn’t let a disability stop him.”
By the time she was a teenager in the 1980s, her father became Deputy Director of Social Services in the port city of Liverpool, later becoming one of the first appointed General Managers for Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), positions now known as Chief Executive Officers. His work in the economically depressed city brought Duff into contact with several psychologists, and she was intrigued by their work. “I was 16 when I decided I would be a clinical psychologist,” she says. “I wanted to work with people and help them work through change. There were great health differences in areas around the U.K. When I was growing up, I had a strong sense of social justice and wanting to support people and enable their access to care.”
Duff studied psychology at the University of Plymouth and did her practicum at a mental health hospital near Southampton for people convicted of serious crimes. There she worked with patients on anger management and social skills while also advocating for their human rights. As a doctoral student, she attended a presentation on the psychological effects of spinal cord injury and decided that was the field she wanted to specialize in.
For her dissertation, Duff researched the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder among people with spinal cord injuries. She expected to find a high incidence of PTSD because back then many people had sustained their injuries in vehicular accidents, a common cause of PTSD. But that wasn’t the case. Only about 20% of people with SCI had symptoms of the condition, which may include flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. “I concluded that the lengthy physical rehabilitation process can help people to process their PTSD symptoms,” she says. “People who have another kind of traumatic event without such a catastrophic injury may go back to their previous life the next day. That’s where there’s a disconnect.” Duff’s dissertation was published and she received her doctorate in 1997.
The same year, she went to work as a clinical psychologist at the National Spinal Injuries Centre, based at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, part of the NHS’s group of eight hospitals that specialize in SCI. There she worked with Paul Kennedy, an internationally renowned clinical psychologist who believed in the value of collecting data and doing research. Each patient was evaluated with the extensive Stoke Mandeville Spinal Needs Assessment Checklist, which examines knowledge, skills and rehabilitation outcome, creating a valuable database for Kennedy and Duff’s future research. She developed a specialty in helping people with SCI build self-management skills and the mental resilience to deal with a chronic condition. “Encouraging people to gain those skills and return to life really fits with who I am and what I think is important,” she says.
Duff was interested in conducting research but the funding opportunities for psychologists in the U.K. are relatively scarce. She met Allen Heinemann, PhD, the director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes 嫩B研究院 (CROR) at Shirley Ryan 嫩B研究院 in Chicago, at a meeting of the International Spinal Cord Society, where Duff heads the Psychosocial Special Interest Group.
When CROR received grant funding in 2023 to compare hospital length of stays for people with SCI across five countries, Heinemann immediately thought of Duff to head the U.K. part. The five-year project, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation 嫩B研究院 (NIDILRR), hopes to identify how differences in inpatient rehabilitation length of stay affect outcomes for people with spinal cord injury.
“Jane is very warm, very attuned,” says Heinemann. “She is passionate about providing high-quality rehabilitation services and ensuring people with SCI resume their lives as soon as possible in ways that reflect their goals and dreams. “When we were identifying partners that could contribute to the project, Jane was at the top of the list.”