Juana Gu00f3mez-Benito
Published: 2017
Total Pages:
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Background: World Health Organization established the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (WHO, 2001) to determine the functioning and disability of patients in different health conditions in a comprehensive way. The ICF has more than 1400 categories, but in each health condition only categories that better describe the patient's functioning in that health condition are used. This is called the ICF Core-Sets (ICF-CS).Objective: Shows the main characteristics of the studies that try to analyze if the categories of the different ICF Core-Sets are adequate and enough to evaluate the functionality and disability of patients.Method: We did an analysis of articles that investigate the issue of the proper functioning - validation (adequacy and sufficiency) of ICF Core-Sets in practice to assess the disability and functioning of the patients. The review was conducted on WoS and Scopus databases and spanned from the years of 2007 to september 2018.Results: 19 articles were selected that met the established criteria. Some of the results that were found were that 84.21% of the studies investigated the functioning of the Core-Sets using a single country, that most of the studies focus on two health conditions: Osteoarthritis (21.05% of studies) and Low Back Pain (15.79%). Other result we found that not all the studies reported the number of centers, clinics or hospitals where they evaluated the functioning of the ICF-CS, only 15 studies reported about this. One of these studies did it in 34 centers, other in 14 hospitals and another in 5 sites. The rest (13 studies) did it in 4 centers or less. Discussion: We conclude that the studies of the functioning (adequacy and sufficiency) of the ICF-Core-Sets should include different countries to analyze the validity at a cross-cultural level since it was found that most of them were carried out considering only one country, for example, consider at least one country from each of the six WHO regions. Another conclusion was that it is necessary more hospitals to have a greater diversity in the sample by study, because generally 4 centers or less were used. Finally, in the future, more studies should be conducted to evaluate the ICF-CS of more health conditions, especially mental health conditions, because in this research we did not find many.