Abstract
(Purpose and methods) The length of hospital stay after onset/injury/ to transfer (the acute period of admission from the onset [of illness]/ injury/ surgery) through to admission to the convalescent rehabilitation ward (hereafter convalescent rehab ward) is strictly limited, which causes difficulty for patients whose stay exceeds this fixed number of days. As a result there have been concerns for some time that patients expected to recover through rehabilitation may end up being deprived of this opportunity due to prolongation of the number of post-onset hospitalization days. We therefore inquired into and discussed the impact of the length of post-onset hospitalization on prognosis by conducting a survey. The subjects were patients administered to our unit in the hospital for rehabilitation prior to establishment of the convalescent rehab ward, and questions surrounded the reasons for extension in length of stay after onset, and length of stay in convalescent rehab ward and outcomes (rate of discharge to home). (Results) The length of stay and outcomes (rate of discharge to home) were 91.7 ± 65.8 days and 80.1% for the group of patients (group I : 73 cases) who were within the limited period of length of stay after onset, while the group of patients who exceeded the limited length of stay (group II : 34 cases) yielded more favorable results with 109.7 ± 58.8 days and 67.6%. Although no significant difference in results was observed. Furthermore, the majority of group II (known causes of 25 out of 34 cases) extended the length of their post-onset hospitalization for reoperative surgery, comorbidity and treatment of complications, and satisfactory rehabilitation outcomes were observed, in 23 out of 34 cases (67.7%) being discharged home. From these results we believe that difficulty in admitting patients into the convalescent rehab ward merely because they have exceeded the maximum length of hospital stay is a big problem, and there is a need to improve the medical system after hospitalization.
