Reply To: Discussion Forum 6

[Hoeung HEAM “[email protected]”]

1) In Cambodia, it used to be 5 international NGOs are the key players of rehabilitation service. They mostly started or supported rehabilitation service since later 1990s or early 2000s. They were HI France, HI Belgium, ICRC, Veterans International, Cambodia Trust. However, there are three of them exist for supporting current rehabilitation service in Cambodia are HI (now is Humanity and Inclusion), ICRC, and Exceed World Wide (formerly Cambodia Trust). These three INGO now are also facing challenges in funding rehabilitation service.
2) Rehabilitation in Cambodia is under the leadership or mandate of Ministry of Social Affairs. Recently, government issued a directive to instruct the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Health (MoH) to transfer rehabilitation service under the MoH. Therefore, practically this is part of the consideration of the WHO Guide to Action. In addition, MoH is now including rehabilitation service into its hospital service policy and guideline. The issue is that it has been almost two years, the transition of rehabilitation service is not moving forward because the Ministry of Social Affairs seems does want to let the rehabilitation service go to MOH. It is important to note that there are some initiative on the development of rehabilitation service guideline under the social affair mandate. This service guideline was based on the WHO building block.
3) Rehabilitation service is poor from my opinion and experience. Once it was with funding support from 5 INGOs, there were quite a lot of services available including support for accessing rehabilitation service that help people from limited socioeconomic background. However, since less support began in early the 2010s, many people cannot user rehabilitation service. For instance, many children with moderate to severe cerebral palsy in poor family and in the rural communities cannot have wheelchairs or seating system, children with autism cannot access to service due to no such service available or only available at the capital city, epilepsy children can access to physiotherapy and convolution medication, etc. However, we have not reliable data on the real need of rehabilitation service in country. It is noted that the democratic survey 2021 reports that the county have disability prevalence of 25% of the population.