In the occasion of the Second World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Rehabilitation 2030 Meeting in Geneva, on the 10th-11th  of July, WHO rehabilitation programme together with the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research organized a research meeting. The objectives of the meeting were:

1.    To agree on a health policy and systems research framework for rehabilitation;

2.    To identify a first set of research questions;

3.    To identify enablers and barriers to building health systems and policy research capacity in rehabilitation. 

To this meeting were invited member states, major professional organizations, research and academic institutions, patient organizations and private sectors. Stefano Negrini attended on behalf of Cochrane Rehabilitation.

The first day plenary lectures and panels were held and the second day the attendants worked in small groups to make proposals on different health systems focusing on key enablers, key strategies and outcomes. They also produced a first proposal of a reference framework (FIGURE WHO – legenda: first reference framework proposed by WHO) as an advancement to the provisional one proposed by WHO (Figure newly developed – second provisional reference framework coming as a result of the Meeting): more advances are expected in the future. They came up with some interesting research questions for health system research in rehabilitation. This is the first step toward developing a real research agenda: the WHO will continue this work in the next months through consultations and possibly other targeted meetings, with the aim to complete the agenda by November 2020.