A study on children with disabilities and their consumption of health services, education and welfare is under way by the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute (MJB) in cooperation with the ministries of Education, Finance, and Health, the National Insurance Institute, and JDC-Israel Ashalim. As part of this study, MJB conducted an international review of the main tools used to define and measure disability among children in order to devise a reliable tool to identify children with disabilities in Israel.
This report opens with different perspectives on the conceptualization of disability, and describes the challenges involved in formulating an operative definition. It then surveys several tools in use in the US, the EU and Israel. It includes the mapping of the types of disabilities that appear for each tool and an examination of the formulation of the questions for each. The construction of the tool to identify children with disabilities in Israel includes adjustments for the local culture and the target population.
For each of the tools reviewed, the guiding principles of its authors are given, as well as its advantages and disadvantages. The concluding chapter presents the formulation procedure for the tool to identify children with disabilities along with the criteria that define who is a child with disabilities.The Brookdale Child Disability Screening Questionnaire is a unique, innovative and comprehensive tool, developed on the basis of a survey of the many tools in use in the area of children with disabilities. Moreover, it contains questions relating to a broad range of disabilities and health problems, yet it is easy to understand and to use.