Vincent Grote

By Vincent Grote, Alexandra Unger, Henry Puff and Elke Böttcher

The incidence of chronic diseases is rising. Rehabilitation plays a vital role in preventing and minimizing the functional limitations associated with chronic conditions and aging. Routine outcome measures include disease-specific and unspecific general health parameters. This study evaluates indicators for medical quality outcomes from 10,373 patients (61.00 ± 13.65 years, 51.7% women) who have undergone orthopedic rehabilitation for three weeks. Inpatient rehabilitation reduces lifestyle-related risk factors, optimizes organ functioning and improves the well-being in the majority of patients (81.3%; SMD = 0.52 ± 0.38). Improvements of unspecific and indication specific outcome parameters can be observed in a comparable magnitude. However, disease specific and unspecific health factors are not directly related to each other (r = 0.19). Age, gender, ICD-classification and time of rehabilitation have an influence on initial values and on indication-specific medical outcomes but are insignificant with regards to improvements in unspecific medical outcome parameters. Inpatient rehabilitation includes two main pathways of medical practice, which can be clearly distinguished in terms of their therapeutic outcome. There are general health interventions, such as lifestyle modifications, diet and physical exercise, and symptom-specific treatments. So multidisciplinary medical rehabilitation improves general well-being and physical functioning as well as reduces risk factors in the majority of patients.

Part of the book: Physical Therapy Effectiveness