[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. A typology can be defined with the association of three characteristics: several disabilities; physical, behavioural and relational impairments; need for a multidisciplinary rehabilitation team. This typology requires a specific rehabilitation treatment as from the acute phase of intensive care.