Community rehabilitation standards and resources launched to support allied health professionals

Published 09/10/2023

We have released new All-Wales Community Rehabilitation Best Practice Standards and digital resources for Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) delivering rehabilitation services, and people who need access to them.

Demand for rehabilitation services is growing. This is due to an aging population, more people living with frailty, long-term complex conditions, deconditioning (a decline in physical function) and the impact of the pandemic on people’s health and wellbeing.

Ruth Crowder; Chief Allied Health Professions Advisor, Welsh Government said

The development of these rehabilitation best practice standards is the next step in our transformation of services to ensure the highest quality of outcomes to the populations of Wales and the best experience for people using services.

Since the publication of the Allied Health Professionals Framework for Wales in 2019, we have continued to modernise and develop services that use the unique skills of the allied health professions and wider health and care workforce to deliver the highest value in our services.

Download the standards here: All-Wales community rehabilitation best practice standards - September 2023

 The All-Wales Community Rehabilitation Best Practice Standards have been designed to:

• support professionals working in rehabilitation services to understand and deliver standardised rehabilitation
• allow rehabilitation services to benchmark their service against others, look at ways to improve their own service provision, and help identify quality improvement projects
• ensure anyone who needs rehabilitation can access these services and receive holistic treatment with them at the centre, while also giving them guidance on what they can expect.

The standards contain two self-audit tools: one for service providers and one for service users. These will help people working in rehabilitation to see how their service is meeting these standards. It will identify the quality enablers needing to be improved and the document will provide resources to improve them. It will also act as a platform, for people working in rehabilitation services and those using rehabilitation services, to feedback on their experience so we can continue to improve.

In addition, we have designed example Microsoft Form templates for teams or services. These will support you further in gathering feedback from practitioners or service users in an alternative format.

These standards and quality enablers have been developed to support the All-Wales Rehabilitation Framework (2022) by providing more specific standards for community rehabilitation.