[Evaluation and reintegration of disabled people (author's transl)]

Medical assessment of a disability, and of the disabled person's performance profile, are necessary for identifying a need for rehabilitative measures, and as one of the sources of information required for individual rehabilitation programming. Assessment of this kind may be sufficient for the multitude of clear-cut rehabilitation problems to be considered provided that due regard is paid to the final goal of any rehabilitative actin which is not medical or vocational but to compensate for those consequences of impairment and disability that make up for social handicap. Persons with severe or multiple disabilities, especially in the case of progressive impairments, require a more indepth and multidisciplinary evaluation on the basis of prolonged and, if necessary, repeated medical rehabilitation measures. The approach in existence at the rehabilitation centre of Cologne University, which has been forming over almost 20 years, is used to describe the process of medical, social, and prevocational assessment in various training areas, the coordination and documentation of the final evaluation, and the indispensable verification of rehabilitation prognoses through long-term follow-up. Notwithstanding growing difficulties faced in vocational resettlement and increasingly severe impairments in the rehabilitees, more than 70 percent of prognoses in the last years, too, have been correct. Rehabilitation procedures and evaluation results proved to have been equally reliable for somatic, psychic or multiple disabilities.