Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine (Aug 2020)

Development of an integrated rehabilitation pathway for individuals recovering from COVID-19 in the community

  • Manoj Sivan,
  • Stephen Halpin,
  • Lisa Hollingworth,
  • Nicola Snook,
  • Katherine Hickman,
  • Ian J. Clifton

DOI
https://doi.org/10.2340/16501977-2727
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 52, no. 8
p. jrm00089

Abstract

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Objective: COVID-19 is a multisystem illness that has considerable long-term physical, psychological, cognitive, social and vocational sequelae in survivors. Given the scale of this burden and lockdown measures in most countries, there is a need for an integrated rehabilitation pathway using a tele-medicine approach to screen and manage these sequelae in a systematic and efficient way. Methods: A multidisciplinary team of professionals in the UK developed a comprehensive pragmatic telephone screening tool, the COVID-19 Yorkshire Rehabilitation Screen (C19-YRS), and an integrated rehabilitation pathway, which spans the acute hospital trust, community trust and primary care service within the National Health Service (NHS) service model. Results: The C19-YRS telephone screening tool, developed previously, was used to screen symptoms and grade their severity. Referral criteria thresholds were applied to the output of C19-YRS to inform the decision-making process in the rehabilitation pathway. A dedicated multidisciplinary COVID-19 rehabilitation team is the core troubleshooting forum for managing complex cases with needs spanning multiple domains of the health condition. Conclusion: The authors recommend that health services dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic adopt a comprehensive telephone screening system and an integrated rehabilitation pathway to manage the large number of survivors in a timely and effective manner and to enable the provision of targeted interventions.

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