Overview of Habilitation and Rehabilitation for Children and Adolescents in Europe

According to the World Health Organization, “rehabilitation [of people with disabilities] is a process aimed at enabling them to reach and maintain their optimal physical, sensory, intellectual, psychological and social functional levels. Rehabilitation provides disabled people with the tools they need to attain independence and self-determination.” The World Health Organization’s Website illustrates this definition with a photo showing a child in a wheelchair; however, the spectrum of rehabilitation goes far beyond neurologic disabilities and includes virtually all organ systems with or without neurologic comorbidities. Unfortunately, these other indications for rehabilitative care are sparsely mentioned in the relevant literature dealing with rehabilitation of children. The article discusses such issues and the current status of this are of child health care in Europe, emphasizing that the tradition and degree of pediatric rehabilitation vary widely. Although some countries, such as Germany, have widely adopted trends of the 1980s to establish pediatric rehabilitation as an separate field or even discipline,other countries have not felt the need to do so, and consider rehabilitation a responsibility of hospitals or other already existing health care providers. These factors are also discussed in the article