Evaluation of community-based rehabilitation for disabled persons in developing countries

Almost all governments and non-governmental organisations in developing countries use a community-based rehabilitation (CBR) approach to work with disabled people. Although disabled peopleʹs organisations reject the categorisation of disability in individual terms, ‘medical rehabilitation’ is still regarded as an important but time limited process within rehabilitation. The paper lists measures and methods used in a comprehensive evaluation, and presents a practical method to examine the quality of medical rehabilitation. The method was developed and applied in an evaluation of service needs and service provision for disabled people in low-income communities, for the Ministry of Welfare, Government of India. The method described is a tracer approach. It assesses quality in three aspects of medical rehabilitation: image