Accessible temporary houses, rehabilitation planning in earthquake areas in Umbria: Assessing functioning profiles in persons with disabilities

Abstract

This study comes from needs of people with disabilities after the earthquake in central Italy in 2016. People with disabilities that lose their house undergo changes in living conditions, housing, social life and health services. That leads to a reduction in activities, in assistance skills of families, in participation and in quality of life. We plan to project Accessible Emergency Housing Solutions (SAE) in accord with “design for all” criteria, to assessing people with disabilities, to provide and personalize Accessible SAE, to plan rehabilitative interventions solutions to improve participation, quality of life in the new life context post earthquake. The project involves the Rehabilitation Department of USL Umbria 2, the Assistive Technology Products Centre, Health Districts, Municipalities, Umbria Region Civil Protection. We defined appropriate tools based on ICF, adapted to the specific needs in earthquake emergency, to systematically assess disability related problems. We used a direct semi-structured interview to collect informations about health, functioning, family context and assistance need. We created functioning profiles to define the appropriateness of SAE's assignment and house adaptation needs to improve accessibility. We included 194 people with disabilities candidate for Accessible SAE; 102 people had functional limitation or other conditions that required adapted temporary accessible houses, personalized and with appropriate size. 783 SAE will be realized in earthquake areas, 102 of them (13%) will be Accessible SAE.People will be checked after the entrance in the Accessible SAE to define the impact of them on quality of life and to plan eventual rehabilitation and assistance programs. The application of ICF based assessment tools improved disability management, allowing the identification of accessible housing, technologies and rehabilitation needs to improve participation and social inclusion. The study shows the importance of standardising the assessment of disability in a more complete biopsychosocial framework to support disability in disaster areas.