Community-based rehabilitation (CBR) is presented as an alternative or complementary approach to rehabilitation in institutions. In developing countries, these institutions are non-existent, or considered inadequate. In the CBR concept, rehabilitation of people with disabilities takes place in the community and relies explicitly on the involvement of lay people, i.e., family members, volunteers, schoolteachers and village community workers. Rehabilitation has gone through a paradigm shift from a medical to a human rights model. Disability is more and more perceived as an impoverishing condition in which the disability and poverty in sync deny people a decent life. Consequently CBR is described as a strategy to improve the socio-economic status of people with disabilities and to improve their quality of life.
This article discusses the ‘state of the art’ of CBR and analyses shortcomings of current research in CBR. Evaluations and research rarely focus on outcomes related to community development or the Millennium Development Goals. It is argued that CBR needs interest from researchers from different disciplines and to use their instrumentation or develop it jointly. Quality of Life researchers are challenged to develop these tools with the main stakeholders in CBR.
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Finkenflügel, H. (2009). Prospects for Community-Based Rehabilitation in the New Millennium. In: Møller, V., Huschka, D. (eds) Quality of Life and the Millennium Challenge. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8569-7_16
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