Even in conflict zones, community-based rehabilitation for disabled people works
According to a new study from the Brown School and the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, a community-based rehabilitation program (CBR) may be a successful approach to giving treatments to individuals with disabilities even in places where there is conflict, such as Afghanistan.
In May, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health released an article titled “Access to Services from Persons with Disabilities in Afghanistan: Is Community-Based Rehabilitation Making a Difference?”
The senior author was Parul Bakhshi, assistant professor of occupational therapy at the School of Medicine, and the corresponding author was Jean-Francois Trani, associate professor at the Brown School.
CBR programs are meant to help people with disabilities in all areas of their lives, including education, social, economic, and medical services.
The goal of the research was to find out if a large-scale CBR program would make it easier for people to get services like physical therapy, assistive technology, education, employment, advocacy, and community awareness.
Between July 2012 and December 2013, researchers enrolled 1,861 freshly recruited CBR volunteers with disabilities from 169 Afghan areas in the study.
From 2012 to 2015, the CBR participants and controls were followed and interviewed three times. When the CBR participants were compared to the control group, they found that their needs were met more often.
