Karine Toupin April is an Associate Professor in the School of Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Ottawa. She is cross-appointed with the Department of Pediatrics and is affiliated with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) Research Institute. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Occupational Therapy and undertook graduate and post-graduate training in public health and epidemiology.
She has research expertise in chronic disease management, complementary medicine, patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), shared decision making, patient engagement in research and knowledge translation. Her work has included research in pediatric and adult rheumatology, with experience in conducting systematic reviews and developing PROMs, clinical practice guidelines, patient decision support interventions and self-management tools. Her main research project aims to develop, evaluate and implement a web-based decision support intervention called the JIA Option Map to help youth with juvenile arthritis choose among pain management options with their families and health care providers. Her research is financed by The Arthritis Society, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) Chronic Pain Network, and the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade.
She is an editor of the Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group and the chair of the OMERACT (Outcome Measures in Rheumatology) shared decision making working group. She has been teaching occupational therapy and medical students at the University of Ottawa since 2008. She is a member of Affaires Francophones and the “Medicine and the Humanities” committee at the Faculty of Medicine. She is also a member of the French Language Services Advisory Committee at CHEO.