The Role of Rehabilitation Nurses in Enhancing Patient-Centered Care

Abstract

Patients can receive rehabilitation in a variety of environments, including hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, and outpatient clinics. Each of these facilities can provide high-quality care, but service delivery and payment arrangements differ. A patient-centered rehabilitation program assesses capacity for participation. The process of rehabilitation focuses on behalf of the patient, identifying the most important things to complete in life and health, analyzing barriers to participation, providing helpful components to address barriers, prescribing specific interventions, and implementing goals through evidence-based approaches. To boost compliance and benefit from risk-benefit analyses, procedures are carried out together with relevant others (Atwal et al., 2007).

Patients are the professionals of their own rehabilitation processes, and they are expected to take on this role and follow it. Rehabilitation staff help these patients articulate what their rehabilitation focuses on, while also providing helpful interventions and tailored follow-ups. If the patient-centered approach to rehabilitation is fully implemented, the patient should be in charge of their rehabilitation. They are knowledge-rich in terms of their rehabilitation goals but if encouraged to take on the role of a professional in the rehabilitation process, insights learned from monitoring strategies need to be shared with rehabilitation staff.

Denationalization, or confronting the development of problems and choices not made, should take more to ensure that responsibility for the process is located with patients. To achieve this, the collaboration of relevant stakeholders is needed; that is, looking beyond rehabilitation professionals. Many factors that influence the patient-centered approach to rehabilitation include the rehabilitation organization and structure, financial arrangements, scientific knowledge production, and lack of awareness about optimal delivery and usage of rehabilitation. It is important to design quality-follow-up studies to further assess the treatment processes, if they focus on capacity for participation, and the effects of patient-centered rehabilitation.