Comparison of physician outcome measures and patients' perception of benefits of inpatient neurorehabilitation.

Rehabilitation aims to reduce the impact of disease, within the limitations imposed by available resources and the underlying disease. Measuring rehabilitation is difficult. Rating scales of impairment, disability, and handicap are often used but only partially reflect the rehabilitation process, tending to be “physician oriented.” Rehabilitation is a patient based educational process working towards self management. Therefore, patient oriented measures should be used, as it is only the patients themselves who truly appreciate the impact of their illness, and the benefits from rehabilitation. The visual analogue scale is a patient based measuring tool that can be used to answer a variety of questions. We evaluated how much the traditional, physician oriented measures reflect the benefit perceived by patients, as measured on a visual analogue scale, within the setting of a neurorehabilitation inpatient unit.