Rehabilitation Medicine Consultant Expert Witnesses provide comprehensive and tailored assessment, diagnosis and long-term healthcare planning for patients with the expertise to effectively and assess rehabilitation needs for all levels of severity and complexity.
Consulting with a specialist in rehabilitation medicine is essential for solicitors who are representing claimants with neurological disabilities or injuries that require extensive medical treatment or ongoing rehabilitation services.
What do Rehabilitation Medicine Consultants do?
Rehabilitation Medicine Consultants:
- provide a formulation of the situation and a suitable management plan (such as a Specialist Rehabilitation Prescription) for any patient referred, no matter what their age, condition or complexity, and in any setting
- manage safely and effectively all the long-term rehabilitation needs of patients with conditions within the doctor’s areas of expertise, in any clinical or community setting and encompassing all degrees of severity and
complexity
- recognise when a patient’s clinical situation requires additional input from another part of the health service.
Though doctors are an essential part of any rehabilitation team, the UK has one of the lowest number of rehabilitation doctors in the developed world – just 0.2 per 100,000 per head of population when compared with 1.9 (Sweden), 2.0 (Germany), 2.9 (France) and 3.7 (Italy).
There is overwhelming evidence that rehabilitation provided by teams with appropriate expert knowledge and skills, who work collaboratively and include formal liaison or goal-setting meetings, have an active education programme, and engage families in the process, improve patient outcomes and often are very cost-effective.
Find a medical expert witness
To enquire about appointing an expert witness for your case or a Consultant in Rehabilitation Medicine to oversee a rehabilitation programme, request a call back or contact us directly.
About Consultant in Rehabilitation Medicine expert witnesses
Rehabilitation Consultants can assess any long-term effects or complications that may arise from an injury and provide advice on how to manage them. Through medico legal reports, they provide insight into the type of treatments and therapies that would be most beneficial for the client’s particular situation and other considerations for long term planning.
As an expert witness, their expertise can also be invaluable when it comes to assessing damages in personal injury cases. By understanding the full scope of an individual’s medical needs and potential long-term effects, they can help the Courts accurately calculate compensation amounts that are fair and just.
During their training, Rehabilitation Medicine Consultants gain experience in neurological rehabilitation, traumatic brain injury rehabilitation, stroke rehabilitation, spinal injuries, musculoskeletal disorders and trauma rehabilitation, explored in-depth below.
Many specialists also undergo specialist expert witness training.
Neurological rehabilitation (excluding spinal cord injury)
Neurological conditions constitute the largest single workload for inpatient rehabilitation services, and are responsible for much of the severe long-term disability in the community. Consultants are responsible for:
- inpatients, outpatients, nursing home visits, ward referrals
- acute
- disorders affecting (primarily) the brain such as traumatic brain injury, peripheral nerves (including traumatic damage) and muscles (muscular dystrophies)
- prolonged disorders or consciousness
- challenging behaviours
- functional neurological disorders
Spinal injuries
The management of spinal cord injuries has been organised separately for many years, although gradually services are becoming part of more general rehabilitation services. Consultants are responsible for:
- inpatients, outpatients, nursing homes, acute referral wards (e.g. trauma)
- acute phase, from initial assessment; rehabilitation phase; long-term care and management including advising on patients admitted to hospital with other health conditions
- tetraplegia (cervical spinal cord injury), paraplegia, and cauda equina damage; complete and incomplete spinal cord injuries
- people needing ventilatory support
- sexual functioning
Musculo-skeletal disorders
Musculo-skeletal disorders (which in this context includes chronic spinal pain) are probably the most common disabling conditions and although patients with these conditions rarely need inpatient services, they probably constitute the majority of community-based patients. There is also a close link to trauma, but trauma has been separated here to reflect the recent setting up of special trauma rehabilitation services which also cover burns, acute spinal cord injury, soft-tissue trauma, trunk trauma etc. Consultants are responsible for:
- outpatients and community services (including exercise prescriptions)
- clinical experience with chronic pain services, domiciliary services, specialist orthopaedic
- rheumatological services
- services for functional disorders such as fibromyalgia and hypermobility syndrome
Trauma rehabilitation
Each of the Major Trauma Centres in the UK should have at least one full-time or equivalent Consultant in Rehabilitation Medicine. Consultants are responsible for:
- outpatients, acute inpatients, domiciliary/community services
- assessing acutely injured patients from a rehabilitation perspective using the trauma rehabilitation prescription
- burns
- neurological and general intensive care
- major skeletal trauma
- acute spinal cord injury
- traumatic limb loss
- hyperacute inpatient rehabilitation
- seeing children and teenagers