Rehabilitation Care for Clinically Complex Older Adults Across the Continuum of Care

With the growing aging population, older adults are living with increasingly complex health conditions. Consequently, their rehabilitation needs are growing and require unique approaches. This population accesses rehabilitation across the continuum of care from primary to acute care, and from community-based to long-term care. The setting in which care is provided depends on a multitude of factors including health characteristics, social supports, and systemic policies. Irrespective of setting, rehabilitation is essential to improving quality of life, functioning, and participation across the broader domains of health (i.e., physical, cognitive, psychosocial, and environmental) for our aging population. Research in this area is limited and often focuses narrowly on a singular disease state or within common care settings.

As the population continues to age with multiple chronic or long-term conditions, rehabilitation professionals will be working with individuals who have increasingly complex health conditions in each health care sector. We need to better understand how rehabilitation professionals can optimize care for older adults living with complex health conditions during each interaction with the healthcare system. The aim of the current Research Topic is to cover emerging, innovative, and promising research for this population.

Areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
• Innovations in care delivery models
• Promising rehabilitation interventions
• Policy recommendations
• The use of technology to support rehabilitation
• Clinical tools to inform decision making processes about rehabilitation
• Economic evaluation
• Outcome measure evaluation
• Research from home care, community care, long-term care, acute care, inpatient or outpatient rehabilitation, primary care, mental health
• All study designs and manuscript types are welcome