Beyond dressing and driving: Using occupation to facilitate community integration in neurorehabilitation

During the process of community integration, individuals with acquired brain injury may experience difficulties in all areas of occupational performance including self-care, home management, community access, leisure, social activities and vocational pursuits. Community based rehabilitation services provide opportunities to minimise such difficulties by working with clients as they engage in meaningful real-life context-based occupations. The therapeutic use of occupation is at the core of occupational therapy practice. We reflect on the nature and principles of occupation and highlight particular benefits for facilitating community integration after brain injury. This is illustrated using the example of executive dysfunction. Several challenges for the occupational therapy profession arise from the shift in focus from hospital to community based rehabilitation, and the need for further research on community integration after brain injury from an occupational perspective is recognised

ICF-Based Tools in Rehabilitation Toward Return to Work: Facilitating Inter-professional Communication and Comprehensive Documentation

An important goal of rehabilitation with regard to community integration is return-to-work, and vocational rehabilitation plays a key role in return-to-work efforts as well as encouraging employment retention. For vocational rehabilitation to be successful, a comprehensive, client-oriented, and inter-professional rehabilitation management approach is essential. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF), specifically ICF-based documentation tools that correspond to the “Rehab-Cycle” model, can guide the inter-professional rehabilitation management process by providing the rehabilitation team tools for structuring and coordinating their tasks from the identification of the problem to the planning of rehabilitation services, thereby promoting inter-professional communication and facilitating comprehensive client-oriented documentation. This chapter outlines the ICF-based documentation tools – ICF Assessment Sheet, ICF Categorical Profile, ICF Intervention Table, and the ICF Evaluation Display – and illustrates the use of these tools in a case example of Martin, a 26-year-old male with paraplegia, who participated in vocational rehabilitation program