Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine: Special Issue 50-4bokBW

J Rehabil Med 2018; 50: 307–308 GUEST EDITORIAL SCALING UP REHABILITATION: TOWARDS AN INTERNATIONAL POLICY AGENDA In February 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) held a meeting at the Geneva headquarters entitled “Rehabilitation 2030 – a call for action”. For 2 days governments, non-governmental orga- nizations (NGOs) and academic experts discussed the need to implement rehabilitation services everywhere in the world and to make these ser- vices available to all who need them. Although no formal decision was made, the background documents expressed a strong commitment to the following actions (1): • Creating strong leadership and political support for rehabilitation at sub-national, national and global levels. • Strengthening rehabilitation planning and implementation at national and sub-national levels. • Improving integration of rehabilitation into the health sector to effectively and efficiently meet population needs. • Incorporating rehabilitation in Universal Health Coverage. • Building comprehensive rehabilitation ser- vice delivery models to progressively achieve equitable access to quality services, including assistive products, for all the population. • Developing a strong multidisciplinary reha- bilitation workforce suitable for the country context, and promoting rehabilitation concepts across all health workforce education. • Expanding financing for rehabilitation through appropriate mechanisms. • Collecting information relevant to rehabilita- tion to enhance health information systems including system level rehabilitation data and information on functioning utilizing the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). • Building research capacity and expanding the availability of robust evidence for rehabilita- tion. • Establishing and strengthening networks and partnerships in rehabilitation, parti- cularly among low-, middle- and high-income countries. At this meeting, a document that included the WHO recommendations, entitled “Rehabilita- tion in health systems”, was launched (2). The document is based on scientific evidence concer- ning rehabilitation service implementation and intensive discussions of an international panel of experts. It comes to 7 main conclusions: • Rehabilitation services should be integrated in health systems. • Rehabilitation services should be integrated into and between primary, secondary and ter- tiary levels of health systems. • A multi-disciplinary rehabilitation workforce should be available. • Both community and hospital rehabilitation services should be available. • Hospitals should include specialized rehabilita- tion units for inpatients with complex needs. • Financial re sources should be allocated to reha- bilitation services to implement and sustain the recommendations on service delivery. • Where health insurance exists or is to INTR become available, it should cover rehabilitation ser- vices. This document also includes a practice statement on assistive products, which states: “Financing and procurement policies should ensure that as- sistive products are available to everyone who needs them” and that “adequate training should be offered to users to whom assistive products are provided”. Since the enactment of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (3) a growing consensus is that steps should be taken to ensure that all people expe- riencing disability should have access to quali- fied rehabilitation services. In 2011, the WHO provided data on the prevalence of disability worldwide and documented gaps in rehabilitation service provision (4). As a result, the World Health Assembly adopted the “Global Disability Action Plan 2014–2017: Better health for all people with disabilities” identified as 2 of its objectives: “to strengthen and extend rehabilitation, habilitation, assistive technology, assistance and support ser- vices, and community-based rehabilitation” and “to strengthen collection of relevant and interna- tionally comparable data on disability and support research on disability and related services” (5). In light of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (6) the availability of health services is seen as one of the preconditions for sustainable country This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license. www.medicaljournals.se/jrm Journal Compilation © 2018 Foundation of Rehabilitation Information. ISSN 1650-1977 doi: 10.2340/16501977-2317

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