[Treatment Quality or Hotel Quality - What Determines more Rehab Satisfaction and Subjective Treatment Success in Psychosomatic Rehabilitation?]

Background: Rehab satisfaction and treatment success are firmly anchored in the German Pension Insurance's quality assurance program as quality criteria for medical rehab. In the field of psychosomatic rehab, there are hardly any studies in which the relative importance of treatment- and hotel-related characteristics for the prediction of these criteria has been investigated.

Methods: In a secondary analysis, anonymous survey data from 25 psychosomatic rehab clinics/specialist departments were analyzed. The sample comprises around 50,000 inpatient rehabilitants from 2018-2022. The surveys were conducted using a largely standardized questionnaire for the purpose of internal quality assurance. The extent to which the two outcome criteria can be predicted from 14 predictors (assessments of partial performance areas) and from a heuristic model with three blocks of variables (KV=control variables, RB=rehabilitation treatment, HL=hotel services) was examined using regression analysis.

Results: All 14 predictors correlate significantly with both criteria and can explain a total of around 67% (rehab satisfaction) resp. 40% (treatment success). In stepwise regressions, the predictors "psychotherapeutic care" and "preparing for the time after rehab" contribute most to the prediction of the criteria. Hierarchical regressions show that the incremental share of the RB block in the prediction of both criteria, i. e. the share that can be attributed with certainty to the rehab treatment variables, is many times greater than that of the hotel services.

Discussion: The hierarchical regression analyses support earlier findings that characteristics of the actual rehab care (e. g. good psychotherapeutic support) play a much greater role for the rehabilitants with regard to both outcome criteria than hotel -related features. There is much to suggest that these findings are also valid for inpatient psychosomatic acute care.