It also is carefully designed to be relevant across cultures as well as age groups and genders, making it highly appropriate for heterogeneous populations.
All aspects of a person's life (development, participation and environment) are incorporated into the ICF instead of solely focusing on his or her diagnosis.
[4] Once a rehabilitation team is aware of the daily activities a client is required to participate in, the problem solving sequence set up by the ICF can be utilized.
Knowing how a disease affects one's functioning enables better planning of services, treatment, and rehabilitation for persons with long-term disabilities or chronic conditions.
The current ICF creates a more integrative understanding of health forming a comprehensive profile of an individual instead of focusing on one's disease, illness, or disability.
Environmental factors are quantified with a negative and positive scale denoting the extent to which the environment acts as a barrier or facilitator.
An ICF Core Set can serve as a reference framework and a practical tool to classify and describe patient functioning in a more time efficient way.
[10] It is hypothesized that using an ICF Core Set will increase the inter-rater reliability when coding clinical cases as only the relevant categories for a particular patient will be utilized.
Since all of the relevant categories are listed in an ICF Core Set, its use in multidisciplinary assessments protects health professionals from missing important aspects of functioning.
[14] The coding system can provide essential information about the severity of a health condition in terms of its impact on functioning.
The first draft of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health for Children and Youth (ICF-CY) was completed in year 2003 and published in 2007.
The key environments of children and adolescents include their homes, day care centers, schools and recreation settings of playground, parks, and ball fields.
With a coding system such as the ICF-CY, the transition will be smoother and interventions can start where the previous health provider left off.