Consensus Making Process in the Korean Academy of Medical Sciences Guideline for Physical Impairment: Evaluation as a Social Process

The steering committee of the Korean Academy of Medical Sciences Guideline for Physical Impairment was fully aware of the social processes of disability evaluation from the beginning and thus, developed a series of strategies to examine and incorporate social property of the evaluation into the evaluation guide. Although those strategies could not be implemented to full extent because of lack of budget and time, we believe it worthwhile to share those in this paper as an example of general framework for developing disability evaluation. A series of strategies will be introduced and discussed that views the evaluation process as social per se, and propose a scheme that is designed to obtain growing legitimacy starting from core experts to expanded experts to general public. Also preliminary analyses on surveys of public attitude and experts' opinion with regard to the relative importance of each possible disability revealed the following three facts: 1) Public had difficulty weighing relative importance of many impairments. 2) Regarding some impairments including complex regional pain syndrome many doctors had varied opinions. 3) Public attitude did not always consistent with doctor's opinion. All these findings strongly suggest the need for developing strategies to draw consensus for legitimate and effective evaluation.