[Rehabilitation from a socio-epidemiological viewpoint--what should and what must be changed?]

Rehabilitation, along with curative treatment and prevention, is a function within a social system of comprehensive measures and services aimed at the maintenance and restoration of good health. Rehabilitation at the same time, however, is a task assigned to specific social service administrations within the structured system of social security. This entails deficits in the effectiveness and efficiency of rehabilitation measures. A working group on "reorientation in health care" has developed proposals for reducing these deficits, bearing reference, in its proposals, to the course of chronic diseases and pointing out the measures that would, in the various disease stages, be capable of securing care continuity as well as of improving the quality of care. Key factors involved are the rehabilitation competence of the primary-care physicians, as well as the competencies of patients themselves.