Title:
Essential Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation in Acute Care

Authors:
Sarah Bicker, MOT, OTR/L
Tamara Shorr, OTR/L

JACOT Volume 2, Issue 1

Abstract

Comprehensive rehabilitation is essential to maximize the functional potential of individuals who have been diagnosed with spinal cord injury (SCI). At Harborview Medical Center (HMC), our SCI program’s mission is to provide excellent, comprehensive rehabilitation therapy across the continuum of care. In response to national trends of decreasing inpatient rehabilitation stays, HMC developed a cross-continuum, multidisciplinary SCI Committee in 2016 to examine our SCI program. The SCI Committee found inefficiencies with transitions and inconsistencies within therapy workgroups when treating patients with SCI. The SCI Committee worked for over 18 months to update HMC’s SCI guidelines and collaborated to improve efficiencies for patient and staff education. Through the work of the committee, we implemented therapy practices to initiate specialized SCI rehabilitation more acutely in a patient’s hospital course. Providing rehabilitation therapies in the acute care unit and intensive care unit (ICU) settings comes with challenges. Understanding these challenges can help identify areas we can make a positive impact and highlight areas that remain as barriers to providing rehabilitation therapy. As a result of our program overhaul, we have seen more efficient transitions between workgroups, decreased lengths of stay on inpatient rehabilitation, and increased staff knowledge about providing therapy for people with spinal cord injuries.