Delivering Rehabilitation Care Around the World: Voices From the Field.

OBJECTIVES: To identify the challenges and common issues that the rehabilitation health workforce experienced in delivering services in different practice settings across the world. These experiences could suggest approaches to improving rehabilitation care to people in need. DESIGN: A semi-structured interview protocol centering on 3 broad research questions was conducted to collect data. The data were analyzed to identify common themes across the cohort interviewed. SETTING: Interviews were conducted using Zoom. Interviewees not able to access Zoom provided written responses to the questions. PARTICIPANTS: Participants included 30 key rehabilitation opinion leaders from different disciplines from 24 countries, across world regions and income levels (N=30). INTERVENTIONS: NA. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Although rehabilitation care deficiencies differ in severity, participants reported that the demand for services consistently outstrips available care, regardless of world region or income level. Access and social barriers, particularly in rural areas and remote regions, are common challenges for those delivering and receiving rehabilitation care. RESULTS: Individual voices from the field reported both challenges and hopeful changes in making rehabilitation services available and accessible. CONCLUSIONS: The descriptive approach undertaken has allowed individual voices, rarely included in studies, to be highlighted as meaningful data. Although the research findings are not generalizable beyond the convenience cohort included without further analysis and validation in specific local practice contexts, the authentic voices that spoke out on these issues demonstrated common themes of frustration with the current state of rehabilitation services delivery but also hopefulness that more solutions are on the horizon.

Global Rehabilitation Health Worker Certification: Global Agenda, Local Imperative.

Rehabilitation, seen as a disability-specific service needed only by few of the world's population, has not been prioritized in countries and is under-resourced. A rehabilitation-ready health workforce is potentially the most important resource for improving functioning and the quality of life for the 2.41 billion people worldwide needing this care. In April 2019, CGFNS International, Inc., and the Association of Schools Advancing Health Professions (ASAHP) partnered to respond to the World Health Organization's Rehab 2030, which emphasizes the need for global action by professional organizations, development agencies, and civil society to develop and maintain a sustainable workforce for rehabilitation under different healthcare models in different economies. The global certification framework presented in this article provides a mechanism to validate rehabilitation knowledge and practice competence of individual health workers. The impact of certification on upgrading rehabilitation education and upskilling the world's rehabilitation health workforce cannot be overstated.

The future of nursing: domestic agenda, global implications.

The 2010 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, challenges the nursing profession to take a key role in redesigning the health care system. Intended to shape the future of nursing in the United States, the IOM report has implications for nursing worldwide. While individual states and nursing organizations are developing initiatives to implement the IOM recommendations in the United States, there must be a concomitant effort to examine the ripple effect on global health and the nursing community. This article addresses four IOM recommendations that are directly relevant to internationally educated nurses who practice across borders: nurse residency programs, lifelong learning, leading change to advance health, and interprofessional health care workforce data. The article discusses the IOM recommendations through a global perspective and offers policy implications for legislators, health care organizations and nurse educators, regulators and administrators.