Rehabilitation serves to make patients independent after serious operations, illnesses and accidents. During rehabilitation, patients who have been dependent on assistance for a long time learn to cope as independently as possible in their daily lives with possible new limitations.
What is rehabilitation?
Rehabilitation is intensive care for patients who have suffered limitations and disabilities as a result of illnesses, accidents, or serious treatments made necessary by them. Rehabilitation is an intensive accompaniment of patients who have suffered limitations and disabilities due to illnesses, accidents, or serious treatments that have become necessary as a result. During the initial period, they are helped as much as possible in the hospital and by nursing staff, but the aim of rehabilitation is to show them how to cope with their new situation as independently as possible after treatment. During rehabilitation, patients learn how to handle assistive devices, integrate physical changes into everyday life, care for injuries, and manage their own individual medical situation as much as possible. After rehabilitation, patients should be able to cope as far as possible without caregivers and manage as much of their daily lives as possible themselves with assistive devices. Medical care, however, is still provided by an attending physician during and after rehabilitation, in most cases by the patient’s primary care physician or by a specialist if needed.
Treatments and therapies
Patients in rehabilitation most often have been through serious accidents, are healing from a serious illness, or are already considered cured. Less often, sick people are sent for rehabilitation for whom healing is still a long way off, but who already have to learn to cope with changed physical conditions. Rehabilitation is often used after musculoskeletal surgeries, amputations or transplants. These can be the result of natural age-related wear and tear, osteoarthritis or arthritis, but frequent patients of rehabilitation are also cancer patients. During or after treatment, whether successful or not, a cancer diagnosis often requires serious surgical procedures on internal and external organs that result in massive changes for the patient. Even survivors must adjust their daily lives after recovery to the extent that rehabilitation can help them perform the most important tasks themselves so they are not constantly dependent on assistance. Rehabilitation is also an option for patients from the psychological and psychiatric departments. Since they have been hospitalized for a long time, depending on the severity of the mental illness, they often need support in living a regular daily life again. Depending on the nature of the illness, patients with mental illness may also need the support of rehabilitation to help them cope with limitations caused by the illness and the medication it requires. While rehabilitation after accidents and physical illnesses focuses on showing patients how to manage daily medical care on their own, rehabilitation after psychological treatment aims to teach patients how to manage necessary medications and integrate them into a normal daily life.
Diagnosis and examination methods
Patients in rehabilitation are, from a purely medical point of view, either completely cured or in a transitional phase of their treatment, when they could initially be discharged home. The role of physicians is to make diagnoses and treat the patient to the point where he or she can continue as an outpatient and leave the hospital. However, this does not mean that he can immediately cope with the new situation in everyday life on his own – this is the task of rehabilitation. Medication and aids for everyday life have been prescribed by the doctor who referred the patient to rehabilitation. The medication has been adjusted and the aids are available – rehabilitation only shows the patient how to use them and what he has to observe.In this way, he is not dependent on the constant presence of medical staff for use and intake and, if necessary, can recognize warning signals so that he can consult the doctor at the right moment in the event of difficulties. A wide variety of professional groups work in rehabilitation, including speech therapists, orthopedists, nutritionists, masseurs, medical assistants or psychologists. The complementary team in rehabilitation clinics can develop a treatment program that is just right for the patient’s medical history, as each rehab case is individual and can benefit from different expertise. Accident victims, for example, often receive support from sports therapists, physical therapists, or motor therapists, in addition to psychological care, while cancer patients are more likely to be helped by medical assistants to use medical tools during transitional phases of their treatment or to live with the effects of cancer after a successful recovery. After stomach and intestinal surgery, for example, a stoma, an artificial bowel outlet, is often necessary. This is a major hygienic risk, but one that serves the complete healing of the intestine – the patient learns how to care for the stoma during rehabilitation. New diagnoses are not made during rehabilitation, these have already been made and treated during inpatient treatment. Minor difficulties with aids or permanent consequences of treatment can often be treated by the staff themselves during rehabilitation, provided they are not serious complications. Therefore, the work at rehabilitation consists only of the use of various specialties tailored to the patient and his case, which is considered comparatively pleasant by the patient.
