The scope of uses of ICF

The ICF is a multipurpose classification system designed to serve various disciplines and sectors across different countries and cultures. People may use the ICF across sectors including health, disability, community care, insurance, social security, employment, education, economics, social policy and legislation, and environmental design and modification.

The ICF provides a standard language and framework for the description of human functioning, on a continuum - not just at the extremes - and it is important to remember that it classifies functioning, not people. Because the development and testing of the ICF involved people from a broad range of backgrounds and disciplines, including people with disability, the ICF has a wide range of potential applications. Appropriately collecting functional status information across health and other relevant care systems allows the evaluation of outcomes, comparison of treatments, prediction and management of costs, and assessment of eligibility for government programs.

The aims of the ICF (WHO 2001:5) are to:

• provide a scientific basis for understanding and studying health, functioning and disability, outcomes and processes;
• establish a common language to improve communication between different users, including people with disabilities, health and community care workers, researchers, policy-makers and the community generally;
• permit comparison of data across time, services, disciplines and countries and
• provide a systematic coding scheme of health information systems.

The ICF is a framework and classification system on which assessment or measurement tools may be based and to which they can be mapped. The broad framework puts assessment in context; it provides the focus for selecting relevant aspects of functioning and disability for assessment.

The ICF is useful, not only for identifying people's health care, rehabilitative and support needs, but also for identifying and measuring the effect of the physical, social and policy environments in their lives.

Ethical use of the ICF is of paramount importance. Ethical guidelines were published in the ICF and include requirements to respect the value and autonomy of individual people, to carry out research and classification with the full knowledge, cooperation and consent of the people concerned, and to provide the opportunity to them to participate.