Inpatient Treatment of Elderly Patients with Back Pain with Respect to Multimodal Non-Surgical Complex Treatment - Field Report from a Competence Centre

Low back pain is the most frequent cause of functional limitations, especially in older people. If the achievement of the treatment goals is not guaranteed under outpatient conditions, there is the possibility of non-surgical orthopaedic hospital treatment, either within the framework of diagnosis-related case groups (DRGs) or in the extended framework of multimodal-non-surgical complex treatment, to the billing of which structurally, diagnostically and therapeutically higher prerequisites are linked. In addition to a presentation of the possibilities of multimodal-non-surgical complex treatment, we report on experiences from a specialized hospital, with regard to patient structure and treatment outcome on the basis of data from 2018 and 2019. Our data show that older patients also benefit from conservative inpatient treatment of their back pain. The courses of older patients, whether in DRG or complex treatment, do not differ significantly from that of younger patients (Kruskal-Wallis test with post-hoc tests, p-values>0.1), although the functional capacity remains at a lower level.