Community-based rehabilitation.

Abstract

The World Confederation for Physical Therapy (WCPT) supports the development of community based rehabilitation (CBR) as a means of empowering people with disabilities to maximise their physical, mental and social abilities. 1 Community change is often necessary to promote and fulfil the human rights of people with disabilities and allow them to become active members of their communities. WCPT recognises that CBR extends beyond health and rehabilitation and encompasses educational, social, vocational and economic strategies. Collaboration between agencies, sectors and professionals is vital at all levels to support this comprehensive approach to rehabilitation. Health professionals practise with individuals and local communities as partners in service planning, operation and monitoring. Physical therapists are equipped through their education to practise in both urban and rural settings and have important contributions to make in CBR. These include:

Nine years of war and internal conflicts in Syria: a call for physical rehabilitation services

“…International efforts should be directed to overcome the existing challenges and barriers to providing rehabilitation services such as insecurity, lack of proper coordination and cooperation between different actors, access constraints to some regions, financing problems and burnout of service providers. Adopting the following policies are recommended in order to provide more efficient physical rehabilitation services: (1) conducting need assessment projects to identify the target population, (2) using an informative health system to register the needed people, (3) moving towards needs-driven plans instead of donordriven ones, (4) prioritizing needs for rehabilitation services, (5) integrating the rehabilitation services into welfare and health system, (6) facilitating the access to specialized services across borders, (7) using international, rehabilitation experts during formulating the policies; and (8) applying community-based rehabilitation (Duclos et al 2019;Garry, Checchi, and Cislaghi 2018;Kuipers et al 2019). In total, it is vital to ensure that the importance of physical rehabilitation is not overlooked in the midst of a host of life-threatening and emergency health problems, such as caring for the injured, food insecurity and controlling infectious diseases.…”