Admission and discharge profiles of people with MS accessing in-patient rehabilitation in Canada

Background: Rehabilitation is the mainstay of management for people with disabilities of neurological origin to maximize function and reduce disability. Access to in-patient rehabilitation is usually reserved for people after crises or those who are discharged from acute care such as in stroke or trauma. Access to people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) differs across countries and unknown for Canada. With the progression of MS, quality of life (QOL) becomes more closely coupled with independence and hence timely access to rehabilitation is important. The objectives of this paper are (i) to characterize the disability profiles of people with MS admitted to in-patient rehabilitation in Canada; and (ii) to estimate the extent to which disability profiles differ from admission to discharge.

Methods: A longitudinal study of a rehabilitation admission-to-discharge cohort of 3500 people with MS was conducting using latent class analysis on the five Functional Independence Measure (FIM) subscales for Self-care, Transfers, Locomotion, Bladder/Bowel, and Cognition. The extent to which age, sex, and calendar time was associated with latent class membership, at both admission and discharge, was estimated using ordinal logistic regression, and proportional odds model was calculated for each age and sex.

Results: At admission five classes were identified. The two most prevalent classes included people with total or moderate dependency in all FIM subscales except cognition (n = 1205 and n = 1099). The third most common was dependent in ambulation only (n = 523), followed by dependence in ambulation with varying degree of limitation in self-care and transfers (n = 465, and n = 208). At discharge four classes were identified with the largest class comprising of people dependent in ambulation and to a lesser degree in transfers (n = 1010). The second most prevalent class was no dependency (n = 946), followed by two classes with varying dependency in all subscales but cognition (n = 678 and n = 771).

Conclusion: Overall 62.3% of admissions transitioned to a more functional class by discharge. By discharge 28% of the population was characterized by no dependencies; however, 23% remained with dependencies in all areas. Those in the most dependent classes showed the greatest probability of transitioning to a better class at discharge highlighting the importance of reserving scarce rehabilitation services to those with more disability.