[Rehabilitation in the German statutory accident insurance. Guide to the new outpatient and inpatient structures]

[Trauma rehabilitation : Implementation and challenges]

The current state of posttraumatic rehabilitation in Germany is on the one hand shaped by the efforts of the primary care providers in the acute setting to transfer patients as soon as possible to rehabilitation in accordance with the requirement for a continuous chain of rehabilitation. On the other hand, there are still important treatment gaps due to a lack of options, specialized structures and financing. This has the consequence that severely injured patients sometimes experience substantial difficulties, setbacks and delays on their way back to social participation. This article presents the various phases of rehabilitation and the existing challenges in order to guarantee the universally acknowledged demand for a continuous rehabilitation chain. Reference is made to the missing structures and simultaneously to the necessary continuity of the processes, the quality assurance and the financial prerequisites for new forms of care. This is exemplified by how the continuum of posttraumatic rehabilitation of the German statutory accident insurance with the successful reintegration of trauma victims in work and social life could be a model for insured persons of the statutory health insurance and the German pension fund. The scientific societies of trauma surgery and rehabilitation medicine also promote the model of a differentiated trauma rehabilitation and sustain the idea of a trauma rehabilitation network to increase the chances of the severely injured for the best possible quality of life and social participation.

[Rehabilitation after polytrauma : Definitions and treatment approaches]

After initial resuscitation and surgical reconstruction of structural damages, the functional rehabilitation is one of the critical columns of polytraumatized patient management. This programme starts as early as the initial therapy in the trauma bay and proceeds until socio-professional reintegration of the patient into his pre-traumatic environment.Thus, three phases of a rehabilitation were identified: the early rehabilitation, the post-acute rehabilitation and the continuative rehabilitation.Since the mortality after major trauma is continuously decreasing, the life quality of trauma victims came more and more into the focus of the actual scientific discussion. To improve this life quality, several rehabilitation programmes were developed and varius instruments were developed to quantify outcome results, such as the GOS or the SF-36, respectively.The aim of this review is to describe these various programmes and instruments, to improve the individual rehabilitation process for polytraumatized patients.