This report outlines why all patients should have equal access to high quality, person-centred, community rehabilitation.
What is community rehabilitation?
Community rehabilitation means assessment, advice and tailored rehabilitation support that takes place in settings outside of acute hospital wards and that improves people’s health and wellbeing.
Community rehabilitation helps people with long-term conditions, injuries or illness to live well for longer.
Community rehabilitation can:
- Improve physical and mental health and wellbeing
- Reduce hospital admissions
- Ensure further treatments have the best chance of success
- Enhance self-management of long-term conditions
- Increase independent living
- Support a return to work
Why is a ‘right to community rehabilitation’ important?
Community rehabilitation enables people to achieve more of their potential and live as well as possible.
It can also save significant amounts of tax-payer money by reducing the need for more costly health care and social care. Yet while medical breakthroughs now help many more people survive illnesses and injuries that would have previously killed them, modernisation and investment in community rehabilitation has not kept up.
This means that despite community rehabilitation being every bit as important as surgery or drug treatments, too many people with long-term conditions cannot access it at present.
Download the report for further details.