Supporting the Development of Rehabilitation Education in Central Asia and Eastern Europe

On 7-8 June in Copenhagen, Physiopedia represented ReLAB-HS at the  multistakeholder meeting on rehabilitation education in central Asia and eastern Europe. Physiopedia’s role as part of ReLAB-HS is centred around workforce development making learning from this event key to advancing work in this domain.

“Workforce development is the cornerstone of strong health systems” was the opening remark from Satish Mishra, Technical Officer for Disability, Rehabilitation, Palliative and Long Term Care at the WHO Regional Office in Europe. This set an exciting tone for Physiopedia and the organisation mission to create accessible and appropriate rehabilitation services through equitable access to quality rehabilitation knowledge.

During the two day event, hosted by WHO, World Physiotherapy, WFOT and ISPO, highlighted rehabilitation as a key health service, shared a regional workforce assessment and highlighted situations from some of the countries in attendance.  The event concluded with workshops to develop workforce development roadmaps for each country around education and training, regulation and recognition, data and monitoring, and associations and networks.

“The conversations over the past two days are not new, all countries face the same challenges related to the rehabilitation workforce” said Rachael Lowe who represented Physiopedia, “it is simply comes down to which specific problems relate to that countries context, and high-income countries are not excluded.”


The conversations from this event will contribute towards a workforce development framework that Physiopedia is developing as part of ReLAB-HS and will inform the development of an International Education and Training Toolkit (IRETT) that aims to support workforce development initiatives worldwide.

This work is supported by the USAID funded Learning Acting Building for Rehabilitation in Health Systems (ReLAB-HS) project and is not possible without the generous and committed contribution of the Leahy War Victims fund.

ReLAB-HS is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and is implemented under cooperative agreement number 7200AA20CA00033. The consortium is managed by prime recipient, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.