Clinical standards to assist audit in medical rehabilitation

The professional need for audit has been acknowledged and the discipline of rehabilitation medicine is now included in training programmes in general medicine and surgery. In rehabilitation medicine the data which would allow medical audit to take place have not always been recorded in routine clinical practice. However, the measurements required are not difficult, and have been validated by extensive research in academic units. This paper describes a series of simple, reliable measures and tests which can be used as baseline measures of progress in patients following rehabilitation programmes. It is essential that rehabilitation specialists are familiar with, and use, these basic tools, so that the usefulness of different treatments can be assessed, and their value accurately audited.