Competent Care for Persons With Spinal Cord Injury and Dysfunction in Acute Inpatient Rehabilitation

The purpose of this paper is to describe the resources necessary to provide competent care to persons with spinal cord injury or dysfunction (SCI/D) during their initial acute rehabilitation admission. It is not the purpose of this paper to specify standards of care. Clinical guidelines and standards of care that reflect evidence-based best practices have already been published and are available from various professional organizations.1-14 This paper will provide a brief description of the essential elements of an SCI program and the various discipline areas contributing to it, and it will refer, as appropriate for additional details, to the previously published standards of care. This paper focuses primarily on the initial inpatient rehabilitation phase of care. Although inpatient rehabilitation admissions have become shorter in duration, they are the critical first stage of the rehabilitation care continuum.