Geriatric rehabilitation lacks a common core, systematic review finds

A systematic review of 36 studies (n=10,647) examined the core components of multidisciplinary geriatric rehabilitation [Synthesis]. It found substantial heterogeneity in terminology, team composition and assessment tools — more than 90 different instruments were in use across the studies reviewed. Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment, widely regarded as the evidence-based core of geriatric rehabilitation, was rarely reported as a distinct, defined component of the process, and patients with moderate-to-severe dementia were frequently excluded from the underlying studies.

The review’s central finding is methodological rather than clinical: no single study in the literature could describe a full geriatric rehabilitation pathway holistically, from assessment through to community transition. That gap makes it difficult for any health system to benchmark its own rehabilitation pathway against a defined evidence standard, since the standard itself is not consistently described in the published literature.

For services designing or auditing acute-to-community rehabilitation handoffs, this evidence argues for checking whether the pathway in use is built around a structured, reproducible Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment process — rather than assuming consistency exists because the destination, community rehabilitation, is nominally the same across settings.