Evaluating treatment outcomes

According to Fuhrer (1987) evaluating treatment outcomes should consist of specifying the goals rehabilitation services want to achieve, as well as the identification and assessment of actual results. These procedures should be systematic and should aim towards evaluation treatment programme efficacy and efficiency, and clients’ satisfaction for the results obtained. They should also allow us to observe differences over time in client abilities and performance. Thus, if we want properly to evaluate the efficacy of abilitative and rehabilitative programmes, we need to consider either the degree of decline in disability or the increase in the range of clients’ activities. Therefore, it is the relationship between established, divulged goals and achieved results that should determine the degree of treatment programme efficacy. Outcomes evaluation and the choice of criteria for analyzing the efficacy of programmes involve numerous and complex problem, especially for disabled person, since the universe of the disabled is anything but uniform. In this chapter, some considerations are proposed.