The White Book on disability in Italy: an ICF-based Italian survey

Abstract

Purpose. To describe the functioning and disability profiles of Italian person with disability (PwD) getting invalidity pension.

Methods. Adult subjects were selected within the registries of local health agencies that provide invalidity certificates. The International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) checklist was administered by trained interviewers. Count-based indexes were calculated for each ICF chapter and domain. Descriptive analysis and paired-sample t-test for evaluating differences between capacity and performance indexes in Activities and Participation (A&P) were employed.

Results. A total of 742 persons were enrolled. Mean age among children and youth (N = 106) was 8.6 years, and among adults (N = 636) was 47.6 years. Most common health conditions are neurological diseases (30.2%), tumors (18.1%) and mental disorders (13.5%). Body Functions and Structures impairments are consistent with sample compositions. In A&P, capacity indexes are higher than performance ones, and facilitators are essentially reported among Environmental Factors (EF).

Conclusions. ICF-based tools are adequate to capture difficulties in different A&P areas, and to estimate EF's effect. In our study, the widest difficulties and the widest impact of EF are reported in areas describing activities of daily living, while areas describing communication, employment and leisure time activities are less problematic but, at the same time, less influenced by EF.

Keywords:

• Disability
• ICF
• invalidity pension
• observational study

Acknowledgements

The project ‘Volontariato e Disabilità in Italia: la definizione dei bisogni di cura e l'identificazione dei percorsi socio-sanitari con il linguaggio dell'ICF’ was funded by the Italian Ministry of Health (RF ex art. 56, legge 289/2002). the authors thank the Italian Federation to overcome Handicap (FISH – Federazione Italiana Superamento Handicap), the Italian Association of Neurological Associations (FIAN – Federazione Italiana delle Associazioni Neurologiche), the interviewers and, mostly, the persons who participated in the study. They also thank Marcella Spano for language revision.