Regional geographic disparities exist for patients requiring rehabilitation at an inpatient facility in the US for traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Why this matters
The rehabilitation of patients with TBI often involves time at an inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF), whose role it is to examine and provide care for cognitive and physical impairments with the goal of increasing functional status prior to discharge.
Disparity in outcomes following IRF rehabilitation can be caused by a range of factors, including lower functional status at admission, comorbidities, ethnicity, sex, and age.
It is known that geographic location is also an important factor contributing to rehabilitation outcomes and prevalence of disability in the community, with outcomes in the Southeast region flagged as particularly low; however, there is a lack of national-scale data examining these disparities.