Rehab Select Blog

Have you just had surgery? Are you in the process of working with your health care team, hospital discharge planners, and loved ones to work out what your next steps will be in terms of recovery and rehabilitation? Has inpatient rehabilitation after surgery been recommended for you, or perhaps simply suggested as a good alternative for your post-op care? If so, you may have questions about how short term rehab can benefit you.

If you are in the planning phase of an upcoming joint replacement surgery, you should know that how your recovery and rehabilitation period is handled is extremely important to a successful outcome. For that reason, learning about and carefully planning for that period is as essential to the process as surgical planning is. After all, you'll certainly be anxious to get back on your feet and back to life as quickly as possible. Short term rehab is an important option to consider in terms of helping you do that.

When your life is interrupted by illness or an accident and you need expert rehabilitation services, occupational therapy (OT) can help you regain the life skills necessary to get back to your day-to-day routine and recover your independence. Just as physical therapy helps you regain your range of motion and mobility and cognitive therapy fires up your brain, occupational therapy helps you perform those daily tasks that are seemingly out of reach.

If you'll be headed to rehab after surgery, good for you! A stay in short term rehab can definitely help you get off on the right foot once you're discharged from the hospital, offering the care and support you need to make the most of your recovery. However, while many think of a rehabilitation center as just another hospital – and there are some similarities – you'll find that there are many differences too. Knowing what to expect from your stay can make the transition from hospital to rehab easier and more comfortable.

Finding the right environment for your short-term rehabilitation can be a little confounding. Even if your surgeon or insurance provider favors one possibility, you know the center needs to be an ideal fit in order for a successful recovery. Weighing your options takes time, but it may be the best approach.

Car accident injuries can be life-altering. As a person starts to rebuild their normal life after a car accident, injuries can require ongoing medical care and adjustments in day-to-day life. For many people struggling with car accident injuries, rehabilitation is an important part of the recovery process. Going to short term rehab helps improve recovery outcomes after car accident injuries so that individuals can get back on their feet more quickly.

If you are recovering from an injury or surgery, you may need to undergo physical therapy in order to ensure a proper and quick recovery. This physical rehabilitation can be performed via inpatient rehab or outpatient rehab.

In some cases inpatient rehab, which requires you to stay within a facility in order to undergo physical therapy treatment, will be necessary to properly treat patients recovering from more serious injuries. However, some patients may have the option of undergoing physical therapy outside of such a facility – outpatient rehab.

If you plan to use the services of a short term rehab program as a means of ensuring your best recovery after surgery, choosing a top-notch program that delivers quality care is essential to meeting that goal. One of the most important factors to consider in order to assess the quality of care you can expect from such a program is the patient to staff ratio of that program. What is the patient to staff ratio and why is it so important?

The transition from the acute care setting of a hospital to an in-patient short term rehab program can be a difficult one for patients. Knowing what to expect – including the differences between these two types of care – can make the experience easier and much less stressful. Perhaps the chief difference that patients should be prepared for is a change in the focus of care from simple healing and recovery to rehabilitation. Healing and recovery, of course, remains important in short term rehab, but the primary goal is to help patients regain strength and function lost to surgery, injury or illness as quickly as possible.  

Case managers play an important role in our health care system – a role that has expanded greatly over the last several decades. So what does a case manager do? Case managers are professionals who specialize in overseeing and organizing the case management process, which is, according to the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses, "a process of assessing, planning, organizing, coordinating, implementing, monitoring and evaluating the services and resources needed to respond to an individual's health care needs."