Several readers have found the approach of the UN's ICF to be very stimulating to their thought and work -- but requiring an investment of time to grasp.
Here is an excerpt from "The Beginner's Guide to ICF" that helps introduce its central thrust and aid in grasping the document:
ICF is named as it is because of its stress is on health and functioning , rather
than on disability.
Previously, disability began where health ended; once you
were disabled, you where in a separate category. We want to get away from this
kind of thinking. We want to make ICF a tool for measuring functioning in
society, no matter what the reason for one's impairments. So it becomes a much
more versatile tool with a much broader area of use than a traditional
classification of health and disability.
This is a radical shift. From emphasizing people's disabilities, we now focus on
their level of health.
ICF puts the notions of ‘health’ and ‘disability’ in a new light.
It acknowledges that every human being can experience a decrement in health and thereby experience some disability. This is not something that happens to only a minority of humanity. ICF thus ‘mainstreams’ the experience of disability and recognises it as a universal human experience.
By shifting the focus from cause to impact it places all health conditions on an equal footing allowing them to be compared using a common metric – the ruler of health and disability.
Source:
http://www3.who.int/icf/beginners/bg.pdf
Posted by rollingrains at August 18, 2004 06:53 AM | TrackBack