Confirmed Speakers

Matilde Leonardi

Rehabilitation as a Life-Long Health Strategy

Dr. Matilde Leonardi (IT) will deliver a key note on the congress topic Rehabilitation as a Life-Long Health Strategy.

This session will highlight global examples of professional initiatives and living with rehabilitation, either your whole life or for the rest of your life.

Learn more about Dr. Leonardi.

Gerold Stucki

Professionalizing Rehabilitation as a Discipline of Knowledge

Prof. Gerold Stucki (CH) will deliver a key note on the congress topic Professionalizing Rehabilitation as a Discipline of Knowledge.

This key note session will discuss rehabilitation as a professional, global body of shared knowledge and problem solving. The title of the key note will be: The Learning Rehabilitation System.

Learn more about Prof. Stucki.

William Levack

The Many Goals of Rehabilitation

Prof. William Levack (NZ) will deliver a key note on the congress topic The Many Goals of Rehabilitation.

This session will discuss the diversity of rehab goals in different parts of the world.

Learn more about Prof. Levack.

Alarcos Cieza

Significant Rehabilitation Footprints within Policy Making

Alarcos Cieza (ES) will deliver a key note with the title Rehabilitation, the health strategy of the 21st Century, really?

This session will discuss the many footprints already made, and the future visions of having strong rehab values in policies and political priorities.

Learn more about Dr. Cieza.

Joachim Breuer

Rehabilitation: The Forgotten Tool

Prof. Dr Joachim Breuer, President of the International Social Security Association (ISSA), will highlight and discuss some of the challenges in social security on the globe such as Digitalisation, Demographic Change, Disaster Management.

These challenges do not mention rehabilitation as part of the solution. Breuer argues that rehabilitation is needed to handle or solve the challenges we are facing globally.

François Perl

Disability Management: A Journey to Rehabilitation

Director General Francois Perl will share how the National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance in Brussels has integrated disability management training and certification of professionals into a more global approach to transform a predominantly indemnity-based model into a rehabilitation model.

Kirsten Vollmer

Vocational Education and Training as a Key to Inclusion

M.A. Kirsten Vollmer, Federal Institute of Vocational Education and Training of Germany (BIBB), Bonn, Germany, will present Vocational Education and Training (VET) as a field characterized by multiple general legal conditions, areas of competence and fields of responsibility and a corresponding range of institutions, organisations, stakeholders, structures and interests.

Christoph Gutenbrunner

The Global Rehabilitation Alliance (GRA) - A civil society advocating body

Prof. Christoph Gutenbrunner, Hannover Medical School, Germany, and Board of the Global Rehabilitation Alliance (GRA), will present how the mission of the Alliance is to advocate for the availability of quality, coordinated and affordable rehabilitation through system strengthening according to population needs, and how the GRA will ensure that Disability Inclusive Development is inclusive of rehabilitation to protect especially poor communities to have services locally.

Anthony Lewis Brooks

Virtual Reality Rehabilitation in Moving Societies

Dr Associate Professor Anthony Lewis Brooks, Aalborg University, Denmark, will present a history of VR including the technology adoption lifecycle (a sociological movement model) and uptake in the healthcare industry.

A focus on rehabilitation will follow whereby the speaker's over three decades body of work acts as the presentation vehicle to illustrate contribution to the movement and targeted societal impact.

Thorkild Olesen

Persons with disabilities: We can and we want to contribute

Chairperson Thorkild Olesen, Disabled People’s Organisations Denmark, presents the core message of the organization, and the efforts to create options for persons with disabilities to participate, contribute and join in their communities as citizens of equal status.

The presentation aims to inspire to ensure that rehabilitation policies and practices always take account of the diversity, starting from the life situation at hand.

Felix Welti

Right to Health for disabled Persons – Accessibility, Reasonable Accommodation

Prof. Dr. Felix Welti, University of Kassel, Germany, will discuss the Right to Health as a social and economic human right which contains availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of health care.

Reg Urbanowski

Community reification of the strengths and gifts of people

Reg Urbanowski, Dean, College Of Rehabilitation Sciences, University Of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, will discuss how moving societies requires action that integrates existing values and beliefs about meaningful living in the community. Especially in rural and rural remote areas where rehabilitation, especially community rehabilitation is often sparse.

Moving societies requires us to focus on the strengths and gifts that people with disabilities bring to their community.