ON THE ISSUE OF MEDICAL REHABILITATION: CURRENT LEVEL AND DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS

Abstract

The concern for the health of the population as the highest value in the Russian Federation dictates the necessity to seek the most advanced measures for patients of various ages to prevent disability and reduce the number of severe functional impairments that form during and as a result of illness, leading to limitations in physical and psychological aspects, as well as in the social aspect, including the educational process for children and the employment of adult patients, signifi cantly reducing the level and quality of life. The global medical-social problem lies in providing comprehensive assistance to such categories of patients, which falls within the competence of medical rehabilitation. Its main tasks include maximizing the improvement of the functional state of patients to achieve the most complete recovery or compensation for the functions aff ected by the pathological process and enabling the fullest return to the usual social environment, including domestic, educational, and professional settings. Medical rehabilitation today is a relevant, modern, and successfully developing direction of domestic medicine, based on the scientifi c and practical knowledge and skills of such confi dently established medical disciplines included in the rehabilitation process as therapeutic physical culture and sports medicine, physiotherapy, reflexology, and manual therapy. Physicians specializing in these disciplines, under the guidance and coordination of a physician specializing in medical rehabilitation or physical and rehabilitation medicine, together with a narrow-profi le specialist and, if necessary, involving specialists in clinical psychology, corrective pedagogy, social workers, and others, form interdisciplinary teams aimed at providing maximally early, individual, comprehensive, systematic, and prolonged in time necessary assistance to the children and adult population of our country at all stages of medical rehabilitation. Thanks to eff ective and individual rehabilitation programs, it is possible to more successfully solve such serious tasks as reducing the level of disability, the percentage of people with disabilities, reducing the duration of incapacity for work, and improving the quality and level of life, which ultimately meets the most important objectives of domestic healthcare: preserving and strengthening the health of the citizens of the Russian Federation and preventing adverse outcomes of diseases.