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Review
. 2022 Apr 12:14:781226.
doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.781226. eCollection 2022.

Rehabilitation at the Time of Pandemic: Patient Journey Recommendations

Ahmed M Negm  1   2 , Adrian Salopek  3 , Mashal Zaide  4 , Victoria J Meng  3 , Carlos Prada  5 , Yaping Chang  6 , Preeti Zanwar  7   8 , Flavia H Santos  9 , Elena Philippou  10   11 , Emily R Rosario  12 , Julie Faieta  13 , Shanti M Pinto  14 , Jason R Falvey  15   16 , Amit Kumar  17 , Timothy A Reistetter  18 , Vanina Dal Bello-Haas  2 , Mohit Bhandari  19 , Jonathan F Bean  20   21 , Patricia C Heyn  22
Affiliations
Review

Rehabilitation at the Time of Pandemic: Patient Journey Recommendations

Ahmed M Negm et al. Front Aging Neurosci. .

Abstract

Purpose: The World Health Organization (WHO) declared severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) a pandemic in March 2020, causing almost 3.5 million coronavirus disease (COVID-19) related deaths worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a significant burden on healthcare systems, economies, and social systems in many countries around the world. The access and delivery of rehabilitation care were severely disrupted, and patients have faced several challenges during the COVID-19 outbreak. These challenges include addressing new functional impairments faced by survivors of COVID-19 and infection prevention to avoid the virus spread to healthcare workers and other patients not infected with COVID-19. In this scoping review, we aim to develop rehabilitation recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic across the continuum of rehabilitation care.

Materials and methods: Established frameworks were used to guide the scoping review methodology. Medline, Embase, Pubmed, CINAHL databases from inception to August 1, 2020, and prominent rehabilitation organizations' websites were searched.

Study selection: We included articles and reports if they were focused on rehabilitation recommendations for COVID-19 survivors or the general population at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data extraction: Two of our team members used the pre-tested data extraction form to extract data from included full-text articles. The strength and the quality of the extracted recommendations were evaluated by two reviewers using the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) approach.

Results: We retrieved 6,468 citations, of which 2,086 were eligible after removing duplicates. We excluded 1,980 citations based on the title and the abstract. Of the screened full-text articles, we included 106 studies. We present recommendations based on the patient journey at the time of the pandemic. We assessed the evidence to be of overall fair quality and strong for the recommendations.

Conclusion: We have combined the latest research results and accumulated expert opinions on rehabilitation to develop acute and post-acute rehabilitation recommendations in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Further updates are warranted in order to incorporate the emerging evidence into rehabilitation guidelines.

Keywords: COVID-19; GRADE; ICU rehabilitation; occupational therapy; pandemic; physiotherapy; rehabilitation; scoping review.

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Conflict of interest statement

YC was employed by OrthoEvidence Inc. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Strength and quality assessments for individual recommendations (Guyatt et al., 2008).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
PRISMA flow diagram.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Structure of patient journey recommendations.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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