Rehabilitation is defined as “a set of interventions designed to optimize functioning and reduce disability in individuals with health conditions in interaction with their environment”.
Overview
Rehabilitation is defined as “a set of interventions designed to optimize functioning and reduce disability in individuals with health conditions in interaction with their environment”.
Put simply, rehabilitation helps a child, adult or older person to be as independent as possible in everyday activities and enables participation in education, work, recreation and meaningful life roles such as taking care of family. It does so by working with the person and their family to address underlying health conditions and their symptoms, modifying their environment to better suit their needs, using assistive products, educating to strengthen self-management, and adapting tasks so that they can be performed more safely and independently. Together, these strategies can help an individual; overcome difficulties with thinking, seeing, hearing, communicating, eating or moving around.
Anybody may need rehabilitation at some point in their lives, following an injury, surgery, disease or illness, or because their functioning has declined with age.
Some examples of rehabilitation include:
speech and language training to improve a person’s communication after a brain injury;
physical exercise training to improve muscle strength, voluntary movements and balance in persons with stroke or Parkinson disease;
modifying an older person’s home environment to improve their safety and independence at home and to reduce their risk of falls;
educating a person with heart disease on how to exercise safely;