An investigation into the predictive ability of rehabilitation clinicians

Purpose: There is increasing pressure by providers, purchasers and recipients of service within the United Kingdom for a more accurate prediction of rehabilitation outcomes. The purpose of this research was to investigate how accurately clinicians were predicting rehabilitation outcomes. Method: The study was carried out among 47 patients admitted to a general rehabilitation unit. The Functional Independence Measure and Functional Assessment Measure (FAM) were used as the outcome measure. Results: The results showed a statistically significant positive correlation between goal scores and discharge scores as a total population using Spearmans correlation co-efficient. When breaking the sample into an orthopaedic and CVA population, the predictive ability for the orthopaedic population was consistently higher than for the CVA population. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that the predictive ability of clinicians is good for the rehabilitation population although the prediction is consistently better with the orthopaedic population than the CVA population.