Thamara Raju
Clinical Director - Highly Specialised Neurophysiotherapist
Personal Profile
Thamara is married and has a young family, she enjoys a wide range of activities such as socialising with friends, travelling and learning about different cultures. She enjoys expressing herself with painting and also likes time on her own to reflect and relax. Thamara enjoys going to the gym and attending flamenco lessons which helps her after a stressful day. She can speak Tamil, which is her mother tongue. She generally enjoys working with people and finds it rewarding to know she has made a genuine improvement to the quality of a person’s life.
Professional Profile
Thamara is a senior neuro-physiotherapist. She graduated from Southampton University in 2004 with a Bsc. in physiotherapy and has since worked at Kings college hospital and private hospitals in London, treating neurological inpatients and outpatients.
Thamara has a good understanding of the role of each discipline involved in the rehabilitation process. Working in rehabilitation has allowed her to work closely with a range of specialists from other disciplines including neuropsychologists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, nurses and neurologist consultants. This has enabled her to fully understand what each specialty brings to a patient in their rehabilitation journey.
She has over 10 years of experience working as a physiotherapist with patients who have:
- Spinal injuries all levels (Adult)
- Traumatic Brain injury (Young Adults and Adults)
- Parkinson
- Multiple sclerosis
- Cerebral Palsy
- Stroke
- Orthopedic Injuries (Adult)
- Amputees (Adult)
Thamara is able to assess and set up rehabilitation programs for neurologically impaired inpatients. She is able to set rehab goals and management plans with a realistic outlook into rehab potential and has a strong involvement in discharge planning through a multidisciplinary team (MDT) setting. Thamara is able to create goal setting effectively to facilitate and negotiate discharge and determine ongoing follow up needs. Thamara has also taken on the role as a key worker for allocated patients, which involves being responsible for chairing meetings and managing caseload from admission to discharge. She is able to use various adjuncts in neurological physiotherapy such as splinting, strength training, treadmill, constraint induced movement therapy, visual imagery, stoke bandaging, hydrotherapy and orthotics.
She has also been in charge of running the Functional electrical stimulation clinic weekly with the MDT, running an acupuncture service, and setting up hydrotherapy treatment programs for patients. Thamara has also worked very closely with patient’s family members and carers to help educate them about how to prevent and/or improve conditions of the patient they are caring for.
Thamara keeps up to date with new techniques and technologies available for treating patients. She is able to communicate with a wide range of patients, carers and health and social care team members. She is able to liaise with other healthcare professionals to exchange information about the background and progress of patients, as well as to refer patients who require other medical attention.
Thamara was the lead physiotherapist in the development of neuro-rehabilitation services within a private hospital, and has also undertaken various service development projects and audits in the past within rehabilitation. She has studied for an MSc in neurorehabilitation at Brunel University. She has a keen interest in gait analysis post stroke and management and treatment of complex neurological long-term conditions.
