Tudela Health District launches home rehabilitation program

Tudela Health District (AST) has launched a home rehabilitation programme, initially for patients from the riverside capital. This pilot project, which was designed to start in the first quarter of 2020, could not have started then due to the outbreak of the pandemic caused by COVID-19. This project aims to improve the accessibility of patients with specific diseases to rehabilitation treatment, without compromising its quality.

The team responsible for carrying out this service at home consists of a physiotherapist and occupational therapist, as well as a rehabilitation physician and a chief of rehabilitation care nursing. The pilot program was initiated for patients from Tudela-East and Tudela-Oeste health centers.

Initial rehabilitation for trauma patients

The Home Rehabilitation Program is designed to provide rehabilitation therapy to patients who have fractured a hip, undergone hip or knee arthroplasty, or who have lost functional ability during hospitalization. Initially, it began to include only patients who were discharged from the hospital due to some of the trauma diseases listed above.

Persons included in the program are monitored by a multidisciplinary team. Thus, the assessment of each patient’s inclusion in the program is done by the rehabilitation physician during admission, and once they are discharged from the hospital, they begin physiotherapy sessions at home. Similarly, the occupational therapist offers an initial session to help them adjust to their environment in their new situation and another when the rehabilitation program is nearing its end to assess the progress of the process.

Rehabilitation at home is an intermediate care for patients with reduced functional abilities. The criteria this care should be were set out by the British Geriatrics Society in 2013, which stated the need for a comprehensive assessment of patients, clear planning and timelines for treatment. Likewise, this body decided that it should act to avoid unnecessary hospital stays or inappropriate admission to acute or long-term hospitalization.

Working at home gives each patient and their family a positive impact on their well-being and quality of life. In fact, it is programmed to promote the necessary health education and encourage the active participation and participation of the patient and his immediate environment, as a means to achieve the set goals.

Added to all this it has many advantages, such as improved access to this type of care. It is also an early treatment and, therefore, it is able to reduce the time required to achieve functional goals. On the other hand, by receiving care at home, you avoid traveling to other centers for treatment and facilitating the patient’s comfort and thus his recovery.

Improving access to rehabilitation treatments

In the past three years, Tudela Health District has made significant efforts to improve access to rehabilitation services in order to meet the goals of the Navarra Health Service Functional Capacity Improvement Scheme – Osasonpedia.

The implementation of the Home Rehabilitation Program is another step in the process of bringing rehabilitation treatments closer to primary care in the Tudela Health District, which began in 2019 with the commissioning of the first peripheral rehabilitation units in Centroinego.

The need to provide this type of treatment to primary health areas was one of the areas of improvement outlined in the “La Ribera Walking for health” document, written by the District Primary Care Management Team in 2018. Currently, five of the seven primary areas you have a Peripheral Rehabilitation Unit Prevent patients from traveling to Tudela.