Role of Rehabilitation Department for Adult Individuals With COVID-19: The Experience of the San Raffaele Hospital of Milan.
Sandro Iannaccone, Paola Castellazzi, Andrea Tettamanti and 8 others
PMID 32505489WHAT IT FOUND
The hospital created separate acute, rehabilitation, and quarantine wards to manage COVID-19 patients.
This allowed them to shorten acute stays to 10 days, discharge only patients with negative swabs, and keep staff infection-free by strictly separating care teams and paths.
Key findings
01Reorganizing the hospital into specialized units shortened the mean acute stay from 15 days to 10 days.
02No dedicated health care workers showed signs of infection during the first month of the new phase 2 workflow.
03Patients were discharged only after achieving negative swabs and minimal functional dependence.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
This is a single-center experience without a control group, so it is impossible to know if the outcomes were due to the new organization or other factors. The authors state that clinical data acquisition is still in progress and that follow-up data have not yet been published. The report focuses on process changes and operational metrics (like length of stay) rather than comparing patient outcomes against a standard of care. Staff infection monitoring was limited to body temperature checks and swabs only for symptomatic workers, which may have missed asymptomatic infections.
Declared interests
None reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of staff infections or the reduced length of stay as proof that this specific ward structure is universally effective. These results come from a single hospital's experience during an emergency, without a control group or published long-term patient outcome data.