Mapping the commonalities of rehabilitation: using GUIDE-rehab to open the black box of programmes across diverse health conditions.
Stefano Negrini, Helena Burger, Paolo Capodaglio and 9 others
A descriptive map of what 7 European rehabilitation programmes contain, drawn up with a reporting tool.
No patients were treated, no outcomes measured, no treatment tested. It tells you how to describe a programme, not what to do differently with one.
Key findings
1The 7 programmes together touch every ICF category (body structures, body functions, activities, participation, contextual factors), but no single programme covers all of them. Body functions were targeted by 6 of 7 programmes; activities by 3; participation explicitly by only 1.
2The same intervention components — exercises, orthoses, self-management — appear across programmes serving different therapeutic targets, meaning the same treatment can be aimed at a structural problem in one programme and an activity goal in another.
3Some programmes include pharmacotherapy and surgical procedures as part of the rehabilitation process, even though these fall outside the usual definition of rehabilitation as a non-pharmacological, non-surgical approach.
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What it does not show
Pilot study with only 7 programmes from a single project, so the findings cannot be generalised to rehabilitation practice as a whole. No patients were involved and no patient outcomes were measured; the study describes what programmes say they do, not what happens to people. No inter-rater reliability testing was performed; one researcher did all the categorisation and a second checked. A restricted subset of GUIDE-Rehab items was used, excluding quantities, tailoring, and fidelity information. The programmes are heterogeneous in condition, setting, and country, making direct comparison difficult. Pilot feedback described the tool as 'difficult and time-consuming,' raising questions about whether the descriptions are complete or consistent. The authors acknowledge that imprecise answers or incomplete understanding of the guidelines by the clinical partners may have shaped the results.
Declared interests
Funded by the European Union (Grant Agreement 101080288, PREPARE HORIZON-HLTH-2022-TOOL-12-01). The work of three authors (CK, PC, SN) was additionally supported by the Italian Ministry of Health (Ricerca Corrente). No industry sponsor, no conflicts of interest declared.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →