Information on the Difference Between Restorative Nursing & Rehabilition Nursing

It can be easy to confuse restorative and rehabilitative nursing practices. Both seek to bring the patient better use of his body, but each is a different approach. Restorative nursing is not a new practice, but it has been getting a lot of attention due to its inclusion in the Medicare billing coding. That aside, restorative and rehabilitative nursing are both solid, vital methods of patient care. Each has its strong points and different attributes.

Rehabilitative Nursing

• Rehabilitation tends to focus on specialized skills and the retraining of patients to cope with the effects of an injury or insult. It is retraining, re-education and introduction of new skills to overcome the new injury or impairment that has occurred. Rehabilitative nursing can be very focused on the task at hand -- adjusting to a paralyzed limb, dealing with an amputation -- and aims to achieve the goal over a specific time period. Usually these goals are accomplished by many different disciplines coordinating care, such as nursing and physical and occupational therapies.

Restorative Nursing

• Restorative nursing seeks to compensate for deficits caused by disuse of a muscle or limb. It can also help with changes that occur due to a change in the patient's physiology, such as bowel retraining. Restorative nursing, unlike rehabilitative nursing, is primarily nursing based and is initiated without much input from outside disciplines. It seeks to help a patient maximize his functioning and to maintain that function for a longer period of time. Also unlike rehabilitation nursing, it is ongoing and not focused on an end point. Its focus is to maintain.

Keys to Restorative Nursing

• It is important to start restorative nursing early in the disease process to maintain the function that the patient has. It is through the use of the limbs and the body that it is given strength. Not using the body only leads to weakness and further debilitation and decline. One of the primary concepts of this type of care is to prevent disability by maintaining the ability that the patient has. Restorative nursing also seeks to treat the whole patient, not just the acute problem he came in with. It seeks to help in all phases of his life and assist him in all of his needs.

Rehabilitation and Restorative Side by Side

• Restorative nursing is not meant as a competitor to rehabilitation or therapy. The exercises that nurses perform with patients for restorative care are not meant to replace therapy but to enhance the patient's current level of ability. It cannot and does not try to be a substitute for rehabilitation nursing or therapy. The two should work side by side to provide the patient the best of both worlds. Rehabilitative nursing works on acute injury and insult, while restorative nursing helps the rest of the patient's body maintain its level of function.