Rehabilitation at the Village Level

Abstract

Life After Injury: A Rehabilitation Manual for the Injured and Their Helpers Liz Hobbs, Susan McDonough &Ann O'Callaghan, 2002 Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network ISBN 983-9747-77-0 David Werner's books (Where There Is No Doctor, Helping Health Workers Learn, Disabled Village Children and Nothing About Us Without Us) have created a revolution in medical and rehabilitation practice in developing countries through two main achievements. First, they have demystified medical knowledge and made it accessible to ordinary people living and working in humble circumstances. Second, by using a problem-solving rather than theoretical approach they have given ordinary people the confidence and creativity to solve medical problems once they understand the basic problem to be solved. Life After Injury comes out of the same tradition and has the same aim. The information this book contains is vital to all who deal with trauma, which includes the injured person, their family, friends, and community, as well as professionals. And that is the point of the book: the more people who understand the needs of injured people, the more likely it is that they will be able not only to recover, but also reintegrate into their families and communities after severe trauma and possibly permanent impairment. In the days of apartheid in South Africa a spinally injured white person was likely to live out a normal lifespan; a black person with spinal injury was likely to die within a year from lung or urinary tract infections or from pressure sores. The difference was in the medical care available to whites and blacks and in levels of awareness about how to prevent complications. It is this kind of vital, life-saving knowledge that this book makes accessible to people in poor communities.