Strengthening Rehabilitation in Primary Health Care Virtual Roundtable Series

Rehabilitation services enable optimal functioning, improve quality of life, increase productivity, and maximize the effectiveness and impact of health interventions. They are essential to ensuring continuity of care and represent one of the core components of Universal Health Coverage (UHC).^[1] One third of the world’s population needs rehabilitation at some point over the course of an illness or health condition,^[2] and this need will only keep growing due to aging populations, surging non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and persisting conflict-induced injuries. However, rehabilitation is often under-prioritized in countries’ health systems and UHC strategies, and especially so in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), thereby limiting the longevity and quality of life, functionality, and productivity of the population in need. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Rehabilitation 2030: Call for Action (Rehab 2030) is drawing attention to this gap and advocating for countries to recognize rehabilitation as a key component of UHC alongside promotive, preventive, curative, and palliative care.

Through support from the Leahy War Victims Fund (LWVF) and co-facilitation by the USAID-funded Health Systems Strengthening Accelerator, this activity will bring together a group of country representatives in three virtual roundtable discussions to share experiences and challenges with integrating rehabilitation into PHC, with specific focuses on 1) prioritization and planning processes for rehabilitation, 2) workforce capacity for rehabilitation, and 3) rehabilitation data management, collection, and use. The selected topics reflect common strategies identified by panelists in a previous rehabilitation-focused webinar to promote integration of rehabilitation into primary health care, which will help improve rehabilitation service coverage, health equity, and financial protection.

The goal of this scoping activity will be to develop a concept note for a larger rehabilitation-focused learning collaborative that expands on potential activities and outputs along these three topic areas.

[1] Adapted from WHO Rehabilitation Fact Sheet. Available at https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rehabilitation; Accessed February 26, 2021.

[2] Cieza, A., Causey, K., Kamenov, K., Hanson, S.W., Chatterji, S. and Vos, T., 2020. Global estimates of the need for rehabilitation based on the Global Burden of Disease study 2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet.