Geriatric and physically oriented rehabilitation improves the ability of independent living and physical rehabilitation reduces mortality: a randomised comparison of 538 patients

538 independently-living patients with non-pathological fractures were randomly assigned to receive either physical, geriatric or standard rehabilitation as post-operative therapy. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of each rehabilitation strategy on functional outcomes by comparing the proportion of patients returning to independent living and mortality rates. The results indicated that both physical and geriatric rehabilitation were effective in improving the ability to return to independent living when evaluated 4 months, but not at 12 months, while only physical rehabilitation was found to reduce mortality rates. Additionally, ADL function, hip pain, walking ability and re-operation rate were all found to be unaffected by the modality of rehabilitation.