Institute for Social Medicine and Epidemiology, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562, Lübeck, Germany.
Federal German Pension Insurance, Berlin, Germany.
BMC Psychiatry. 2023 Mar 6;23(1):137. doi: 10.1186/s12888-023-04627-w.
Our analyses examined the extent to which the use of rehabilitation for patients with mental disorders decreased due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.
We used monthly cross-sectional administrative data on rehabilitation utilisation due to mental disorders in 2019 and 2020 and estimated a difference-in-differences model to determine the reduction in rehabilitation utilisation attributable to the pandemic.
We included 151,775 rehabilitations in 2019 and 123,229 rehabilitations in 2020 in our analysis. The number of rehabilitations decreased from April to December by 14.2% due to the pandemic (March to December: 21.8%). The decline was more pronounced for women than for men and varied regionally. Temporal and regional differences in utilisation were moderately associated with the decrease in mobility in the pandemic year. In the first phase of the pandemic, i.e., March and April 2020, the decline was strongly associated with the regional incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Due to the pandemic, significantly fewer rehabilitations due to mental disorders occurred in Germany in 2020 than in 2019. The likely increasing need for rehabilitation for people with mental disorders should be addressed by making rehabilitation access and delivery more flexible.
我们的分析考察了由于 COVID-19 大流行，德国精神障碍患者康复治疗的使用程度下降了多少。
我们使用了 2019 年和 2020 年每月精神障碍康复利用的横断面行政数据，并估计了差异中的差异模型，以确定大流行导致的康复利用减少。
我们在分析中纳入了 2019 年的 151775 次康复和 2020 年的 123229 次康复。由于大流行，从 4 月到 12 月康复次数减少了 14.2%（3 月至 12 月：21.8%）。女性的下降幅度大于男性，且存在地区差异。利用方面的时间和地区差异与大流行年份流动性下降中度相关。在 2020 年大流行的第一阶段，即 3 月和 4 月，下降与 SARS-CoV-2 感染的区域发病率密切相关。
由于大流行，2020 年德国因精神障碍而进行的康复治疗明显少于 2019 年。应该通过使康复治疗的获得和提供更加灵活，来解决精神障碍患者康复治疗需求增加的问题。
