Posts in this category are not easily categorised! They will cover any aspect of rehabilitation and a range of topics peripheral to rehabilitation, matters that should be discussed and considered but may not be – yet.
Rehabilitation services should pay attention to loneliness. It is common, associated with many long-term conditions in rehabilitation, including chronic pain, more common in people with disabilities, and associated with increased morbidity and mortality. It is also a person-centred phenomenon; only the person can judge whether they are lonely and how lonely they are. It is …
In 1978, I submitted my first paper to the British Medical Journal. It concerned what we now refer to as functional disorders, the phenomenon of illness with no identified disease causing it. I have been interested since. A recent editorial by an Oxford colleague, Anton Pick, discussing whether patients with Long Covid had a functional …
What is slow-stream rehabilitation? Dr John Burn is leading a group in writing guidance and standards for nursing homes (care home, skilled nursing facilities) that undertake rehabilitation for some or all residents. This will update guidance from 2013. We recently debated whether slow-stream rehabilitation was an appropriate term to use within the guidance. I argued …
Hospitals are a part of the healthcare system, but is rehabilitation healthcare? The UK Department of Health, responsible for all healthcare and not just hospitals, promotes the idea that a patient only has a right to reside in a hospital until specific criteria are met. The requirements are mainly physiological and do not consider the …
At 02.00 hrs on November 29th, I had an epiphany, “a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation”. [OED] For many years, I have emphasised a distinction between assessment as a process and assessment as a measure (e.g. “the outcome assessment was the Rivermead Mobility Index”), and I have suggested that both should be …
In May 2021, Dr Sabena Yasmin Jameel published her University of Birmingham PhD thesis on Enacting Phronesis in General Practitioners. John Launer wrote about it on November 2nd, and I saw a tweet about his article. She has studied wisdom in general practitioners, but the findings apply to all healthcare professionals. Indeed, rehabilitation professionals should …
“Rehabilitation is a way of thinking, not a way of doing.” I have written two editorials extolling this approach, but I have recently realised that I have not explained the specific “way of thinking”. This omission struck me as I was writing some new pages for the site (not yet published) on training in rehabilitation …
In 2007 Peter Halligan and I asked, “Is it time to rehabilitate convalescence?”. No one answered until, in 2022, Gavin Francis also challenged healthcare practice in his book, “Recovery, the lost art of convalescence.” He argues that “from time to time, we all need to learn the art of convalescence”. The medical literature, however, publishes …
In 1980 I started a three-year project, a large (n = 700+) controlled clinical trial investigating whether a community stroke rehabilitation team would reduce the use of hospital resources. My results found no effect. Twenty years later, I was still interested in community rehabilitation and, with Pam Enderby, published the results of a survey she …
Is frailty a helpful concept within the rehabilitation context? I asked myself this question after seeing a recent paper on people with multiple sclerosis that concluded that there was “a significant relationship between frailty and history of falls in multiple sclerosis, independent of age, sex, and disease severity.” Frailty is widely used but without a …
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