BPS-ICF model, a tool to measure biopsychosocial functioning and disability within ICF concepts: theory and practice...

The transformation of International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps into International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) meant a lot for those needing to communicate in terms of functioning concept in their daily work. With ICF's commonly understood language, the decades' uncertainty on what concepts and terms describe functioning and disabilities seemed to be dispelled. Instead, operationalizing ICF to measure the level of functioning along with the new nomenclature has not been as unambiguous. Transforming linguistic terms into quantified functioning seems to need another type of theorizing. Irrespective of challenging tasks, numerous projects were formulated during the past decades to apply ICF for measurement purposes. This article updates one of them, the so-called biopsychosocial-ICF model, which uses all ICF categories but classifies them into more components than ICF for measurement purposes. The model suggests that both disabilities and functional resources should be described by collecting and organizing functional measurement data in a multidisciplinary, biopsychosocial data matrice.