Thomas Platz - Clinical Pathways in Stroke Rehabilitation: Evidence-based Clinical Practice Recommendations

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Brain injury caused by stroke is a leading cause of disability with a tendency for an increasing societal burden of stroke-related disability globally. At the same time, our knowledge about effective rehabilitation treatment is rapidly increasing as indicated by the multitude of clinical trials, systematic reviews and meta-analyses being published. For the individual health care professionals involved in stroke rehabilitation, it is hardly possible to keep track with the evolution of clinical evidence and hence there is a risk for an increasing gap between the state of the art in clinical stroke rehabilitation research and clinical practice and decision-making.

Guidelines help to bridge this gap, if systematically evidence-based. Usually written for a specific (national) background they are, however, frequently not readily applicable to other health care situations limiting their usefulness elsewhere.

The authors of this book, mainly coming from the various Special Interest Groups of the World Federation for NeuroRehabilitation (WFNR) with a multidisciplinary and regionally diverse background, had a different goal: the development of international evidence-based stroke practice recommendations that focus on the link between evidence and clinical decision-making related to rehabilitation therapy rather than issues related to or being dependent on organisational issues.

As a consequence, the evidence-based practice recommendations that had been developed with an international perspective can be applied globally for clinical decision-making in stroke rehabilitation. In addition, the knowledge provided can be used in very different health care situations to further structure and adapt regional or local stroke rehabilitation pathways. Last but not least, by providing clinical orientation the practice recommendations can support service development in a way that will eventually achieve effective stroke rehabilitation in areas with limited services so far.

The international practice recommendations for stroke rehabilitation developed by the WFNR are published open access with this book supporting their accessibility and dissemination. May they help to promote effective stroke rehabilitation for those in need.

All authors dedicated their time and effort to collectively provide evidence-based guidance for clinical decision-making in stroke rehabilitation. In addition, they provided peer review for the other chapters of this book as did the feedback panel members (for reference see Table 1 in Chap. ). All these contributions are gratefully acknowledged.

The World Federation for NeuroRehabilitation (WFNR) sponsored this book project and made it possible to be published as an open access book. This will largely facilitate its distribution and availability quite independent of financial resources of potential users.