The Academic Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Leeds was one of first academic rehabilitation departments to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach to research, involving medical staff, nurses, allied health professionsals, engineers and other non clinical staff. Over the last 20 years, the department has been involved in a broad spectrum of research activity involving local, national and international collaboration. Research activities have included innovation in rehabilitation services and their evaluation (e.g. family placement scheme; a dysphasia support programme; a community based Head Injury Team, Young Adult Team, taxonomy of community rehabilitation in stroke); chronic disease epidemiology (e.g. traumatic brain injury, stroke, back pain, need for hip / knee surgery, socio-economic effects of rheumatic diseases); building evidence base for specific rehabilitation interventions through controlled trials (e.g. impact of exercise in OA knee; botulinum toxin treatment in adults and children with neurological diseases, impact of rehabilitation treatment intensity); development of new restorative rehabilitation technologies (e.g. intelligent robotic systems); investigation of movement abnormalities and mechanisms of motor learning following brain injury; prosthetic rehabilitation (e.g. invesigation of novel approaches to direct skeletal fixation); application of modern measurement theory to developing new and evaluating existing health outcomes.

The NHS rehabilitation departments serve a large population base across West Yorkshire with developed rehabilitation medicine services in Leeds and Wakefield. These services include a large network of hospital and community based rehabilitation services across three acute NHS Trusts and one Primary Care NHS Trust. These services include the regional traumatic Brain Injury service, regional Spinal Cord Injury Unit and specialist rehabilitation unit for younger people with stroke. Leeds offers the second largest amputee service in the U.K. which has been recently awarded "National Centre of Excellence" for its holistic approach to patient care.