Seven-Year Intervention Rate and Effect of Early Rehabilitation in China: A National-Wide Hospital-Based Study

The improvement of early rehabilitation service capacity is of great importance for meeting health needs of the population; however, there is still a lack of information on early rehabilitation interventions in hospitals in China. This study selected the first page data of 7,914,692 medical records suffered the stroke and brain injury, spinal cord injury, spinal and joint degeneration, fracture and sports injury from 1305 tertiary general hospitals in China from 2016 to 2022. We found that the rate of early rehabilitation intervention in tertiary general hospitals in China increased annually from 2016 to 2022, especially in 2020. The rate of early rehabilitation intervention in patients with complications was higher than that in patients without complications at 7 years. Regardless of complications, the mortality rate of patients undergoing early rehabilitation was lower than that of patients without early rehabilitation. However, the length of hospital stay and total cost were higher in patients undergoing early rehabilitation than those without early rehabilitation. The change in this indicator varied from province to province. This study combined quality improvement measures to summarize the experience of improving the early rehabilitation intervention rate in less developed countries.