MEASURING DISABILITY IN THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT AGED CARE SYSTEM

The ICIDH was developed to assess the consequences of disease and clas sify them as impairments, disabilities and handicaps. By developing a standard classification system it provides a common conceptual framewo rk and terminology for specialists in diverse health care areas. Disab ility measures collated nationally across the Australian Government ag ed care system are plagued by some of the problems that the ICIDH was designed to address. This paper considers the aged care data collectio ns in the context of the ICIDH system and shows that measurement of di sability in national aged care data could benefit from such a classifi cation system.