To facilitate a systematic and comprehensive description of functioning and the use of the ICF in clinical practice and research, ICF Core Sets have been developed.

The background of an ICF Core Set is to provide a list of selected categories from the entire classification that can serve as minimal standards for the assessment, and documentation of functioning and health in clinical studies, clinical encounters and multi-professional comprehensive assessment.

Hence, ICF Core Sets are generally-agreed-on lists of ICF categories relevant for specific diseases or for different health-care contexts. They can serve in clinical studies and health statistics (Brief ICF Core Sets) or guide multidisciplinary assessments (Comprehensive ICF Core Sets) to rate the level of functioning of persons with health conditions.

A Brief ICF Core Set for a specific condition includes as few categories as possible to be practical, but as many as necessary to be sufficiently comprehensive in describing the typical spectrum of problems in functioning of patients with a specific condi-tion in both clinical studies and clinical encounters.

Since the categories of the Brief ICF Core Set for a specific condition are meant to serve as a minimum data set to be documented in every clinical study than can comparably describe the burden of disease across studies, the list needs to be as short as possible.

The Comprehensive ICF Core Set for a specific condition is a list of ICF categories that includes as few elements as possible to be practical, but as many as necessary to sufficiently describe the typical spectrum of problems in functioning of patients with a specific condition for multidisciplinary assessment. This list must obviously be considerably longer than the Brief ICF Core Set.

Different ICF Core Sets for the acute, early-post acute and long-term context already exist. The ICF Core Sets for chronic conditions apply in any care-provider setting. For each chronic health condition, both a Brief ICF Core Set and a Comprehensive ICF Core Set have been established.

A first version of ICF Core Sets for Spinal Cord Injury has been finalized in November 2006. These comprise each a Brief and a Comprehensive ICF Core Set for the early post-acute and long-term context. For the use in the acute context the ICF Core Set for patients with neurological conditions in the acute hospital has been established.

For practice and research, an ICF Core Set lists categories which should be measured — yet it provides no information about how to measure them. In clinical practice, the ICF and/or the ICF Core Sets can be applied to list the impairments, limitations in activities, restrictions in participation, and the influential environmental factors of a determined patient using the qualifiers scale.

This provides a Categorical profile for each patient. The first profile of a determined patient prior to treatment can serve as a reference for follow-up, illustrated within an Evaluation display.

Using an ICF Core Set supports multidisciplinary and comprehensive assessment of functioning. It helps all team members to consider every potentially relevant aspect of functioning in such an assessment of an individual, even in areas of functioning where experts are not specialists.

In addition to the development of ICF Core Sets, more ICF tools are developed to facilitate the use of the ICF in clinical practice. (Click here)

Table 1:  ICF Core Set for Patients with Neurological Conditions in the Acute Hospital

Table 2:  ICF Comprehensive ICF Core Set for Spinal Cord Injury in the Early Post-Acute Context

Table 4:  Comprehensive ICF Core Set for Spinal Cord Injury in the Long-Term Context

An electronic lecture will soon be provided within a Power Point Presentation at this site.

For more information about the ICF, please visit:

http://www.who.int/classifications/icf/site/

and

http://www.icf-research-branch.org/