Review of nursing care for the neuro-rehabilitation patient

Registered nurses who have further education and training in rehabilitation are known as rehabilitation nurses. An introduction to the hospital is usually the first step in training, which is then followed by a didactic component about caring for rehabilitation patients and a preceptorship of varied lengths depending on prior experience. Rehabilitation nurses can advance their credentials by becoming certified in neuroscience nursing by the American Association of Neuroscience Nurses or by becoming certified in rehabilitation nursing through the Association of Rehabilitation Nurses (ARN) (AANN). Increasingly, neurological rehabilitation is viewed as a specialized form of rehabilitation needing advanced nursing skills. However, just as in many other nursing specialties, nurses in this sector know that they must expand their expertise to give their patients and their families the finest and most modern care possible. Neurological rehabilitation nurses must be knowledgeable about the corpus of existing research in this area to practice at a high level of competence and make wise judgments about their practice and future research endeavors. The review concludes that more high-quality and quantity research in this field still needs to be done. Since most of the research was conducted at a single location, it cannot be generalized to other clinical settings.