The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) offers a comprehensive and universally-accepted framework to describe functioning, disability and health in persons with all kinds of diseases or conditions. The ICF, a classification that is exhaustive by its very nature, is quite complex for use in daily practice. In daily practice, clinicians and other professionals need only a fraction of the categories found in the ICF. With this need in mind, WHO created a series of instruments based on the ICF, like the ICF Checklist and the WHO Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHO-DAS II). However, the generic character of the ICF Checklist and the WHO-DAS II may be a drawback in specialty settings. On one hand a common base is needed to compare with other health conditions and interventions; on the other hand we need "variability" to capture the detail to describe the profile of a unique group. This obvious requirement for specialised clinical settings was the primary motivation for WHO, in collaboration with the ICF Research Branch of the WHO-FIC Collaborating Centre in German, to develop the the rigorous scientific process which results in the Comprehensive and Brief ICF Core Sets.

An overview of the ICF Core Sets including the corresponding publications can be found here (click).

The ICF Core Sets Development Process