Rehabilitation in the Acute Care Setting: Are Nurses Ready for the Challenge?

In 2010, New South Wales (NSW) Health released the NSW Rehabilitation Report which provides a way forward to improve equity and access to rehabilitation services across the State. While planners and policy makers decide how to roll out the recommendations, there is a lot that nurses can be doing now to reduce the functional decline that many older people experience as a result of an admission to hospital. Nurses need to be more mindful that the maintenance of physical and cognitive activity during hospitalisation is central to the provision of nursing care that is not detrimental to the overall health and wellbeing of older hospitalised people. This requires nurses to examine how the type of care they currently provide to older people can be disabling. The challenge for all nurses is to adopt rehabilitation and enablement principles into their daily practice by including such things as nurse-initiated exercise plans; identifying the older person’s risk factors for functional decline; and implementing strategies to address them. These strategies can be as simple as ensuring adequate hydration to prevent urinary infections which lead to a delirium. Key words : functional decline, rehabilitation, enablement, older people, acute care, nurses.