Presentations of the 2nd International Symposium: ICF Education
2017-09-29 08:29:56 |
A capacity crowd attended the 2nd International Symposium: ICF Education (See Table 1) held on 30 June 2017 in Cape Town, hosted by the Medical Research Council of South Africa, in collaboration with Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town and the Western Cape Government: Health.
This Symposium built on the first held in Finland in 2015. The aim was to bring together people from around the world who are using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) in clinical practice and teaching such as in interprofessional education, research or product development.
Three topics were addressed:
- ICF as catalyst for interprofessional education and collaborative practice
- ICF Environmental Factors: Catalyst for person-centred healthcare
- ICF-related data: the new frontier of individualised, predictive healthcare
View the presentations and posters here:
Download the programme here: (see PDF attached to email)
The aim of the symposium was to bring together people from around the world to share their experiences and learn from each other.
Table 1: Participant numbers and countries
|
Country |
No |
|
Country |
No |
|
Australia |
1 |
|
Namibia |
1 |
|
Brazil |
4 |
|
Netherlands |
2 |
|
Canada |
2 |
|
Portugal |
2 |
|
Columbia |
3 |
|
Rwanda |
1 |
|
Denmark |
4 |
|
Senegal |
1 |
|
Finland |
1 |
|
South Africa |
116 |
|
Germany |
2 |
|
Swaziland |
1 |
|
Iceland |
1 |
|
Sweden |
1 |
|
Italy |
2 |
|
USA |
1 |
|
Korea |
2 |
|
Zimbabwe |
3 |
1. Interprofessional education
There was consensus that ICF facilitates people working better together, including patients/clients. Examples cited benefits people and services:
- Person-centredness
- Life-course perspective
- Common language
- Accountability
- Integrated and continuous services
Some barriers to ICF use were mentioned:
- Language and model not intuitive for established clinicians
- Whilst students accepted ICF language and thinking, their clinical counterparts must not be forgotten and strategies to support their learning and transition have to be considered.
2. Environmental factors
The importance of including environmental factors was duly acknowledged. South African rehabilitation services use a person’s environmental (and personal factors) to determine interventions, rather than disease.
There is a strong policy framework around using ICF in the Western Cape.
3. ICF related data
Presentations covered approaches to inclusion of the ICF in health information systems, using ICF in the insurance medicine decision support (IMDS) and in electronic medical certificates to assess workability and introduced participants to the ICanFunction mHealth Solution (mICF).
Challenges identified included:
- Working with existing data
- Cultural applicability – tools need translation and validation
- Selecting items relevant to the person not the professional
- Convincing other stakeholders that this is the right approach.
- Analyses taking account of complexity.
Conclusions
As ICF embraces complexity so too applying ICF in the three topic areas is complex. Capturing complexity where time, personnel and data capacity are in short supply was seen as problematic.
The challenge common across the 3 topics is going beyond the model and using the statistical capacity of the ICF.
There was a strong recognition of the need for information on functioning for transitioning services to suit the people rather than professional
