[After care treatment, the optimal form of inpatient rehabilitation]

Follow-up rehabilitation (Anschlussheilbehandlung--AHB) is more and more developing into the decisive element of an up-to-date concept of rehabilitation. It covers patients in urgent need of rehabilitative services immediately following discharge from hospital treatment in order to enable them to reintegrate more speedily in occupational and social life. Field studies have shown that the number of patients referred to these follow-up programmes could be increase tenfold. This would either require special AHB counsellors to be established at hospital level, or the creation of adequately staffed AHB centres servicing a certain number of hospitals. Both alternatives would be intended to select, in consultation with hospital doctors, those patients who could benefit from AHB measures, to assist in their referral to the appropriate AHB clinic, and to foster cooperation and contact between referring hospital and AHB clinic. The existing network of AHB clinics should moreover be extended in view of greater community orientation of service delivery. Follow-up rehabilitation programmes contribute to cost containment, as daily rates in AHB clinics are lower than in the hospitals, and because prolonged incapacity for work is avoided through early rehabilitation.