The ICF CY as a Tool for Assisting Children with Disabilities An Analysis of Its Potential and Limit
9The ICF-CY as a Tool for Assisting Children with Disabilities: An Analysis of Its Potential and Limitations
Layman Abstract : The ICF-CY framework is a tool designed to help understand and describe how children with disabilities function in their daily lives. It’s based on a broader system called the ICF but is specially adapted for children and youth. This tool can be used by doctors, teachers, policymakers, parents, researchers, and even the children themselves to better document and understand their health and abilities.
While the ICF-CY can be helpful, it also has some problems. For example, the coding system can be complicated, it takes a lot of time to use, and it doesn’t always explain clearly how to classify children of different ages. These issues make it harder for people to use it effectively.
Even with these challenges, the ICF-CY can still be useful for planning care, setting goals, and tracking progress. It helps bring together different types of information in one organized place, which can give a fuller picture of the child’s needs and strengths. This can help doctors and therapists choose the right tools to measure progress and design better treatments.
However, the reliability (how consistent it is) and validity (how accurate it is) of the ICF-CY have been questioned. Because of this, it’s not the best tool for detailed measurement, but it can still work well as a general checklist to describe a child’s difficulties, abilities, and needs for support.
Overall, the ICF-CY helps highlight what’s working and what’s not in the way children with disabilities are supported and treated today, giving important insights into how care could be improved.
-------------
Original Abstract : The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health-Children & Youths version (ICF-CY) framework, which is a derivative of the ICF framework, serves as both a conceptual and classification tool developed for children with disabilities. Though it is a potential tool intended for use by clinicians, educators, policy-makers, family members, consumers and researchers to document characteristics of health and functioning in children and youth, it has some pitfalls and limitations in complex coding, time-consuming implementation, and a lack of clear guidelines for age-appropriate classifications. These challenges can hinder its effective use in practice. However, since the ICF-CY provides a framework and structure for collecting and organising information, it may still influence assessment, intervention planning, and outcome evaluation preparation. Using the ICF-CY framework could enhance holistic management for children with disabilities and may also guide researchers and clinicians in their selection of outcome measures for use in research and/or clinical practice, though standard approaches to the evaluation of activities and participation, and environmental facilitators and barriers are required. The psychometric adequacy of the ICF-CY has been doubted due to its low reliability and validity, and therefore it may not be used in totality as a measuring instrument, but rather as a screening tool that classifies functional limitations, participation restrictions, health conditions, their impact on daily activities, and children's functional abilities and intervention needs. The ICF-CY framework has clearly demonstrated the focus of current management practices, as well as strengths and weaknesses in actual practices of childhood rehabilitation.
View Book: https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/msti/v8/4458
#ICF_CY #conceptual_framework #classifications #disabilities #physiotherapy #occupational_therapy