Physical and rehabilitation medicine (PRM) care pathways: adults with severe traumatic brain injury.

This document is part of a series of guidelines documents designed by the French Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine Society (SOFMER) and the French Federation of PRM (FEDMER). These reference documents focus on a particular pathology (here patients with severe TBI). They describe for each given pathology patients' clinical and social needs, PRM care objectives and necessary human and material resources of the pathology-dedicated pathway.

An evaluation of a post-acute rehabilitation unit after five years of operations.

Introduction: The Hospital Organization Guidelines (HOG) recently recommended that Reference Hospitals create Post-Acute Rehabilitation Units (PARU). The authors describe the quality process of a PARU in a University Hospital (UH); this quality process had previously been used in a private rehabilitation hospital.

Goals: The authors wanted to evaluate the organization of the care provided in their PARU and compare the evaluation results with the results expected at the unit's creation five years earlier.

[Ethical and legal points concerning minimally conscious state and permanent vegetative state].

The ethical and legal problems posed by severe outcome of coma are complex and their analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Three aspects have been particularly studied in this paper. The first is a reminder of the medical definitions of the concepts of vegetative state and minimally conscious state.

[Intensive care handling: specific expectations of rehabilitation].

For the severe head injured patients, the way of going from coma to arousal is considerably different from one patient to the other, and it is not always easy to determine the appropriate moment for taking them out of intensive care, into rehabilitation. This is the reason why, instead of considering these two treatments as successive phases, it is better to consider them as a collaboration process. The objective of this paper is to describe the needs of this type of patients, by using the data gathered on a weekly basis in the medical data department of the Centre Médical de l'Argentière, on patients admitted in 2002 in the rehabilitation and post-intensive care departments.

[Management of infectious risk associated with therapeutic pools].

Unlabelled: There is no specific legislation concerning pools and others medical hydrotherapy equipments relating hygiene and security rules. For this reason, the hydrotherapy pools use the public swimming pools legislation.

Method: This article is based on literature review (database Medline and Embase--manual research).