EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICE

Submitted to Mam Azmat

DECEMBER 1, 2021
SUBMITTED BY FAIZA NASRULLAH
Bsrpt02191005/70107930
• HABILITATION:
✓ Habilitation refers to a process aimed at helping individuals with disabilities attain, keep, or improve
skills and functioning for daily living. For pediatric patients, habilitative therapy often aims to help a
child develop motor skills that they have yet to accomplish.
✓ For example, a child with cerebral palsy may require the assistance of a physical therapist to learn
how to sit. Or another child may need speech therapy to learn how to say their R sounds. Because
both of these are skills that the children have yet to accomplish, the aim of the therapy is habilitation.
✓ Habilitation involves one-to-one training for children and young people with a vision impairment.
Starting from their existing skills, it aims to develop their personal mobility, navigation and
independent living skills. At whatever age the training is started, the overriding goal is to maximise
the child or young person’s independence, opening the way in the future, to further study,
employment and an independent life
✓ Habilitation training by a suitably qualified and registered practitioner is necessary for children with
impaired vision because a child who can see would typically develop these personal independence
skills as they grow up in their family. They would observe what other family members and other
people around them did on a day-to-day basis. Typically sighted children would then go on to imitate
what they had seen, repeatedly practising and modifying it, until the skills and strategies they were
using became automatic. Children with a vision impairment cannot observe and watch others to the
same extent (if at all). They cannot see what others do and so learn from what they see.
✓ Habilitation specialist’s work with individual children and young people, their parents and carers and
the educational and other settings they work and live in. Habilitation Specialists, supported where
possible by Habilitation Assistants, train children and young people with a vision impairment in the
use of alternative independence strategies. They support and advise carers on alternative skill
learning as the child grows up, using a range of strategies customised to the age, needs and
development of the child.
✓ The strategies the habilitation practitioner uses involve using the other senses: hearing, touch, taste,
smell and balance in a coherent, planned and systematic way to provide the child with information
about their world. As the child reaches school age, the habilitation specialist works increasingly with
school staff as part of the transition process, along with other professionals, to develop the child’s
independence when travelling to, being at and returning home from school. This includes developing
their independence skills in many areas of personal life such as dressing skills, personal care and
eating, safe travel, shopping and leisure activities.
✓ As the child progresses through the different educational stages, the habilitation specialist supports
them and their families through the various transitions between schooling stages and ultimately their
progress to college, university, apprenticeships or employment.
✓ An Habilitation Specialist (HS) observes, assesses, plans, implements, trains, reviews and monitors a
child or young person’s habilitation programme (in liaison with parents, carers and other key
 professionals from education, health and social care). In particular, the HS undertakes the teaching of
all the practical habilitation skills (from the development of body and spatial awareness to long cane
use) and independent living skills (e.g. cooking, personal care, social skills and purchasing goods).
✓ An Habilitation Assistant (HA), in contrast, works under the direct supervision and responsibility of
the HS. HAs support individual children and young people to practice their habilitation skills and
strategies: this may be inside and/or outside of school or other educational settings. They also
contribute to the monitoring of habilitation progress.
• REHABILITION:
✓ Rehabilitation refers to regaining skills, abilities, or knowledge that may have been lost or
compromised as a result of illness, injury, or acquiring a disability.
✓ For example – a 30-year-old man who is an active runner trips over a rock and injures his ankle. Due
to his injury, this man is unable to walk or run without limping and seeks the help of a physical
therapist to be able to walk and run as he did before. The aim of this therapy is considered
rehabilitation, helping this man regain a lost skill.
✓ Rehabilitation training means all necessary training provided to an individual with a disability to
compensate for a substantial impediment to employment. The term includes manual, preconditioning,
prevocational, vocational, and supplementary training and training to achieve broader and more
lucrative skills and capacities.
✓ Rehabilitation training means all training provided, directly or through public or private
instrumentalities, to an individual to compensate for the occupational handicap of the indi- vidual.
The term includes but is not limited to manual, preconditioning, prevocational, vocational and
supplementary training and training provided for the purpose of achieving broader and more
remunerative skills and capacities.

Understanding the differences between Habilitation and rehabilitation is important,

because:
• it informs research methodology and design bespoke to children and young people;
• child-centered research specifically in special educational needs and disabilities can
provide further and more meaningful understanding of developmental trajectories in
atypical populations;
• researching the effectiveness of Habilitation techniques/developing interventions
subsequently informs practice; and
• a distinct focus on Habilitation will aid the derivation of appropriate theory directly
pertinent to children and young people.