New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

‘The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.' - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

One of the most fascinating and most challenging aspects of rehabilitation is the interprofessional nature of it. Rehabilitation occurs within a context that frequently involves clinicians from various professional backgrounds working (ideally together!) on problems faced by people with health conditions and their families/whanau/carers. When we talk about rehabilitation however we should also talk about the intersectoral nature of it. Rehabilitation in the ‘health' sector should involve engagement of agencies from other government sectors (e.g. ‘housing', ‘social development', ‘education', ‘justice' etc). It is interesting then to reflect on how little interprofessional and intersectoral communication about contemporary issues in rehabilitation actually occurs. I would suggest that the vast majority of communication about issues related to rehabilitation currently occurs within discipline-specific forums - in our own professional conferences, journals and newsletters - or in treatment ‘silos' such as ‘gerontology', ‘mental health', ‘sport rehabilitation' etc.

As a case for illustration, in October this year (2006) the government celebrated the final closure of Levin's Kimberly Centre, which has been presented by the Ministry of Disability Issues as ‘the end of institutionalisation in NZ'. (Older adults in rest homes are clearly not considered ‘institutionalised' under whatever definition is being used here.) What I find interesting is that unless you live or work with people who have intellectual disability in NZ, you might not have even known that this ‘milestone' had been reached. This is likely to be the last case study of deinstitutionalisation that we will see in NZ for a while. Isn't it possible that what was learnt during this closure of Kimberly might be relevant to people working in other parts of NZ health system, such as traumatic brain injury or mental health rehabilitation? This was after all an exercise in ‘community reintegration'.

My argument here is that few organisations offer the kind of opportunities for crossing boundaries between professions, between sectors, and between stakeholder groups, as does the NZRA. The upcoming 2007 NRRINZ/NZRA Conference provides one such opportunity, but we need others. Another initiative currently being pursued by the NZRA is a major redevelopment our website - to allow free-access and interactive discussion of rehabilitation news.  We will of course continue to keep you posted!

[Post-script: (9/7/08) (1) The redevelopment of the NZRA website described here is the project that was financed by the Community Partnership Fund and the Website Project Partners, completed in August 2008.  (2) The desinstitutionalisation of the Kimberley Centre has been the subject of a longitudinal study conducted by the Donald Beasley Institute.  For more information about this research, click here.]