Nicola Marotta, Antonio Ammendolia, Cinzia Marinaro, Andrea Demeco · 6 authors
BACKGROUND: Stroke is the third cause of long term disability worldwide and its rehabilitation program must to have into account all aspects of disability. International research and politics increasingly study the relationship between disability and the direct costs associated with living with a disability. OBJECTIVE: Using the ICF, this article provides a correlation between financial assets and disability in participation and activities, in a context such as the Italian one where there is a twenty-year decentralization of the national health system Methods. At the University of Catanzaro, in southern Italy, n=130 ICF checklists of stroke patients were analyzed at 6 months from the end of the rehabilitation treatment. Financial assets domains in environment and nine domains in participation and activities were correlated, in order to evaluate the relationship between familiar economic condition and disability. RESULTS: Pearson's r test (t = -6.6515, df = 25, p-value<0.05) showed a significant correlation of 0.79. Multiple R-squared was 0.639 and an we reported an Adjusted R-squared of 0.6245 (p<0.05). Thus, about 62% of the increase of the all considered disability qualifiers in participation and activities in ICF checklist can be explained by a lower financial income. CONCLUSIONS: In a regional context (Calabria) of an European country (Italy) with a national health system, thanks to the ICF it can be assumed that with the decrease of the financial income, the gap in participation of activities increases.
Over the last decades social and behavioural research about disability in Sweden has expanded considerably. The development over the last 40 years can be described in four phases of the development: early initiatives, getting integrated, getting established and late developments. It describes a journey from an activity separated from the traditional university system and mainly occupied by evaluating reforms sponsored by short-term grants to an established academic activity with a broad range of research topic and with a growing engagement in theoretical questions. During the past years, disability organizations have reacted critically as they found themselves having little influence on research that is done, a reaction that includes dissatisfaction with what is experienced as inability of researchers to make research politically relevant. What started in a society with a centralized structure and ambitious social engineering ideal now has to find its role in a more decentralized structure where reform ambitions and the role of social movements like disability organizations are different. To balance the need for autonomous research with the ambition of being politically relevant without falling for the temptation of being politically correct is one of the challenges social disability research in Sweden will have to deal with in the near future.