While Italy was already struggling with the epidemic of COVID-19, the U.S. was not yet, and the 14th ISPRM World Congress (together with the 53rd AAP annual meeting) was held in Orlando with some reduced participation from Europe but not from the U.S
About 2,300 people attended the meeting. At the end of the conference, however, colleagues had been called back to their universities and hospitals. The conference started without hand sanitizers, but gradually they were made widely available. The coronavirus was in fact the main topic of discussion.
As Cochrane Rehabilitation, we had the chance to greatly contribute to the conference. Carlotte Kiekens, our co-director, gave a plenary lecture in which she envisioned "RehabUtopia," an island where the quality of treatments, the attention for and active involvement of the patients at all levels of the organization, and evidence implementation allow perfect rehabilitation to be realized.
Also as chair of the ISPRM-WHO Liaison committee, she presented the work done in the framework of Rehabilitation 2030 in two different sessions, mentioning the role of Cochrane Rehabilitation in the development of the Package of Rehabilitation Interventions.
The Congress hosted also a Cochrane Rehabilitation Session in which we presented our activities with a special focus on the last two Cochrane Rehabilitation methodology meetings: the third methodology meeting which was held in Milan in February 2020 and was aimed to define an operationalisation of current rehabilitation definitions to be applied in research; and the fourth methodology meeting which took place in Orlando (as you can read in the above news) aimed to develop the RCT rehabilitation checklist (RCTRACK).
The results of the last methodology meetings were the main topic at the Cochrane Rehabilitation Advisory Board Meeting, where all stakeholders were consulted and had the chance to give their useful contributions to better conclude these two initiatives.