To Advance the New Disability Evaluation System in Taiwan

Before 2007, the disability evaluation was based on the medical model in Taiwan. According to the People with Disabilities Rights Protection Act announced on 11 July 2007, the assessment of a person's eligibility for disability benefits has to be determined as suffering one of eight malfunction categories based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) framework. People with disabilities want to issue a disability identification and other welfare & services need processes of evaluation & assessment based on the ICF framework for the evaluation report and result of living need by the committee composed of professionals from medicine, social work, special education and employment counseling and evaluation.

In this year, investigators planed the project with the Taiwan Society of ICF to develop the evaluation form. The experts from various disciplines of the ICF Office convened internal integration meetings to reach a consensus for developed the ICF evaluation form, add the code of pain and sleep and the items from Short-Form 12 for quality of life to the questionnaire. The results were used to analysis other relevant factors affecting the disability evaluation. And then add the core set from World Health Organization to both physical and mental disorders linked coding group, compared the new disability evaluation system and evaluate the living need of people with disability to provide suggestion for core set.