Bridging the gap: How Melo supports the new NICE Guidelines for Chronic Neurological Rehabilitation
In October 2025, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published NG252: Rehabilitation for Chronic Neurological Disorders including Acquired Brain Injury, setting a new standard for how rehabilitation should be delivered across the UK healthcare sector.
This comprehensive roadmap calls for commissioners, clinicians, and rehab teams to deliver coordinated, person-centred care that goes beyond discharge and focuses on long-term recovery, participation, and quality of life.
These recommendations speak directly to the values we’ve built Melo around: whole-person care, connected teams, and continuous insight.
A Breakdown of the Guidelines
1. Integrated, Person-Centred Rehabilitation Services
NICE stresses the importance of designing personalised rehabilitative services that are integrated across health, social care, and voluntary sectors, ensuring smooth transitions and continuity of care. With rehabilitation seen as a long-term process, not a one-off event.
2. Early and Ongoing Conversations About Prognosis and Rehabilitation Needs
Discussions about prognosis and rehabilitation needs should be initiated at an early stage in a patients care pathway. These needs should be revisited and amended regularly to adapt to changing circumstances. These discussions empower people and families to understand what’s possible, set realistic goals, and stay motivated.
3. Holistic Needs Assessment
Comprehensive assessments should be performed that consider physical, cognitive, emotional, and social aspects to inform individualised rehabilitation plans and lead to more personalised care. These assessments also help demonstrate need and inform future commissioning decisions.
4. Coordinated Rehabilitation Plans
Tailored, measurable, individualised rehabilitation plans should be completed and regularly reviewed, with an assigned key worker or single point of contact to coordinate care.
5. Supporting Participation in Education, Work, and Social Life
Rehabilitation plans should facilitate the individual's participation in education, employment, social activities, and family life promoting overall well-being.
How Melo Supports These Guidelines
1. Facilitating Integrated, Person-Centred Services
Melo enables multidisciplinary teams to collaborate effectively by capturing shared notes, assessments, and progress around a patient’s complex behaviours.
Our dashboards and intelligent analytics enhance evidence-based decision-making, helping teams understand the cognitive, emotional, and environmental trends that drive behaviours. This leads to more consistent, person-centred care across settings.
2. Supporting Early and Ongoing Conversations
With Melo, multidisciplinary teams can track a patient’s behaviours and progress over time, providing clear data to inform discussions around prognosis and rehabilitation needs.
These insights ensure that care conversations start early, are grounded in real-world data, and evolve as the individual’s recovery journey progresses.
3. Enabling Holistic Needs Assessment
Melo empowers clinicians to complete comprehensive behavioural assessments including ABC, ABS, OAS-MNR, and SASBA, while capturing data across physical, cognitive, emotional, and social domains.
Our platform also supports the documentation of effective ‘care tips’, helping to build a holistic behavioural profile that informs future interventions and supports continuity across care teams.
4. Coordinating Rehabilitation Plans
Through our integrated features, Melo supports the development, review, and monitoring of individualised rehabilitation plans.
By providing behavioural insights and tracking progress across time, Melo makes it easier to coordinate care and ensure that interventions remain aligned with patient goals and changing needs.
5. Promoting Participation in Life Activities
Melo helps identify barriers to education, work, and social participation by tracking progress across multiple domains.
Our dashboards and summaries make it simple to share meaningful insights with commissioners, funders, and discharge teams - turning everyday clinical data into powerful evidence of service impact and value.
Summary
The new NICE guidelines are a timely reminder that rehabilitation is a lifelong journey, one that demands collaboration, insight, and compassion.
At Melo, we’re proud to help services deliver on this vision. By connecting teams, surfacing insights, and empowering patients, we’re helping transform rehabilitation into a process that’s consistent, data-driven, and deeply human.
💡 Curious to know how Melo could support your service or organisation?
Get in touch today – we’d love to share more.
📖 Read the full guidelines here.
