• Manoj Sivan, Stephen Halpin, Lisa Hollingworth, Nicola Snook, Katherine Hickman, and Ian J Clifton.
• Academic Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Leeds, D Floor, Martin Wing, Leeds General Infirmary, Leeds LS1 3EX, United Kingdom. E-mail: manoj.sivan@manchester.ac.uk, m.sivan@leeds.ac.uk.
• J Rehabil Med. 2020 Aug 24; 52 (8): jrm00089.

ObjectiveCOVID-19 is a multisystem illness that has considerable long-term physical, psychological, cognitive, social and vocational sequelae in survivors. Given the scale of this burden and lockdown measures in most countries, there is a need for an integrated rehabilitation pathway using a tele-medicine approach to screen and manage these sequelae in a systematic and efficient way.MethodsA multidisciplinary team of professionals in the UK developed a comprehensive pragmatic telephone screening tool, the COVID-19 Yorkshire Rehabilitation Screen (C19-YRS), and an integrated rehabilitation pathway, which spans the acute hospital trust, community trust and primary care service within the National Health Service (NHS) service model.ResultsThe C19-YRS telephone screening tool, developed previously, was used to screen symptoms and grade their severity. Referral criteria thresholds were applied to the output of C19-YRS to inform the decision-making process in the rehabilitation pathway. A dedicated multidisciplinary COVID-19 rehabilitation team is the core troubleshooting forum for managing complex cases with needs spanning multiple domains of the health condition.ConclusionThe authors recommend that health services dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic adopt a comprehensive telephone screening system and an integrated rehabilitation pathway to manage the large number of survivors in a timely and effective manner and to enable the provision of targeted interventions.

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