Rehabilitation medicine

Rehabilitation medicine focuses on the diagnosis, treatment and management of people with disabling medical conditions. Rehabilitation medicine physicians work with people with disabilities to reduce the impact of their disease or disability on their daily life, to prevent avoidable complications and to minimise the effects of changing disability.

Rehabilitation medicine serves two main groups of people: those with neurological disabilities and those with limb loss and other musculoskeletal impairments. Some of the conditions covered are: spinal and head injuries, amputation, stroke, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease, Huntington’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. In childhood these may also include cerebral palsy, spina bifida, congenital limb disorders and muscular dystrophies.

Most aspects of rehabilitation medicine require a multidisciplinary team. There is also much overlap with colleagues in other specialties in neurological, neurosurgical, orthopaedic, palliative care, psychiatric, psychological, rheumatological, vascular and pain medicine, as well as paediatric and geriatric colleagues. Social services and other non-medical agencies are often involved in the rehabilitation process to ensure that suitable care continues outside the hospital.

This book provides comprehensive information for healthcare commissioning and service organisation of 28 medical specialties within the UK, and has now been updated to reflect the changes in the NHS commissioning arrangements since the enactment of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. It is therefore an invaluable resource for the NHS clinical commissioning groups, hospital trusts, regional advisers, specialty leads and individual doctors, as well as government departments and leading healthcare bodies.

Along with key points for commissioners within each specialty chapter, the book also lays out specialty workforce requirements and job plans, patterns of clinical work and referral, interspecialty organisation and standards of healthcare provision, which will be of interest to aspiring and newly qualified consultant physicians in the UK and abroad.