scholarly journals Care for capabilities: Implementing the capability approach in rehabilitation of patients with neuromuscular diseases. Study protocol of the controlled before-after ReCap-NMD study

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. e0261475
Author(s):  
Bart Bloemen ◽  
Eirlys Pijpers ◽  
Edith Cup ◽  
Jan Groothuis ◽  
Baziel van Engelen ◽  
...  

Background High quality care of patients with neuromuscular diseases requires a personalised approach that focuses on achieving and maintaining a level of functioning that enables them to be in a state of well-being. The capability approach states that well-being should be understood in terms of capabilities, the substantial opportunities that people have to be and do things they have reasons to value. In this Rehabilitation and Capability care for patients with Neuromuscular diseases (ReCap-NMD) study, we want to investigate whether providing care based on the capability approach (capability care) has an added value in the rehabilitation of patients with neuromuscular diseases (NMD). Methods Two groups of 30 adult patients with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy or myotonic dystrophy type 1 will be included. The first group will receive rehabilitation care as usual with a follow-up period of 6 months. Then, based on theory, and experiences of patients and healthcare professionals, capability care will be developed. During the following 3 months, the multidisciplinary outpatient rehabilitation care team will be trained in providing this newly developed capability care. Subsequently, the second group will receive capability care, with a follow-up period of 6 months. A mixed methods approach is used with both qualitative and quantitative outcome measures to evaluate the effect of capability care and to perform a process evaluation. The primary outcome measure will be the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure. Discussion The ReCap-NMD study is the first study to design and implement a healthcare intervention based on the capability approach. The results of this study will expand our knowledge on how the capability approach can be applied in delivering and evaluating healthcare, and will show whether implementing such an intervention leads to a higher well-being for patients with NMD. Trial registration Registered at Trialregister.nl (Trial NL8946) on 12th of October, 2020.

Author(s):  
Flavio Comim

AbstractThe paper introduces a poset-generalizability perspective for analysing human development indicators. It suggests a new method for identifying admissibility of different informational spaces and criteria in human development analysis. From its inception, the Capability Approach has argued for informational pluralism in normative evaluations. But in practice, it has turned its back to other (non-capability) informational spaces for being imperfect, biased or incomplete and providing a mere evidential role in normative evaluations. This paper offers the construction of a proper method to overcome this shortcoming. It combines tools from poset analysis and generalizability theory to put forward a systematic categorization of cases with different informational spaces. It provides illustrations by using key informational spaces, namely, resources, rights, subjective well-being and capabilities. The offered method is simpler and more concrete than mere human development guidelines and at the same time it avoids results based on automatic calculations. The paper concludes with implications for human development policies and an agenda for further work.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 2485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafaela Hillerbrand

This paper reflects on criticisms raised in the literature on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These have been criticized as creating a dichotomy between the environment and human beings that fails to address the multiple interconnections between the two. This paper focuses on SDG7—“affordable and clean energy”—and suggests that there is in fact a tripartite distinction between the environment, human beings and technology underlying the SDGs. This distinction, we argue, does not adequately represent the multiple interconnections among the various SDGs and hampers their implementation. We contend that the formulation of SDG7 produces a circular definition of sustainability, a difficulty that is currently resolved at the level of the targets and indicators in a way that regards energy technologies primarily as artifacts. By contrast, the literature on ethical aspects of energy systems largely agrees that energy is a paradigmatic example of a sociotechnical system. We contend that, by not considering this sociotechnical nature, the SDGs run the risk of implicitly defending a certain variant of technological optimism and determinism. We argue that this is disadvantageous to the environment, human well-being and technological development. In line with recent critical evaluations of the SDGs, we argue that these (and other) shortcomings can be addressed by better connecting the SDGs to human well-being. Building on recent literature that expands the scope of the Capability Approach as an alternative measure of well-being so as to include considerations of sustainability, we articulate a framework that allows us to elucidate this connection and thus to take advantage of synergies between human well-being and the environment. On the basis of the Capability Approach, we argue that equating sustainable energy with renewable energy—as is done in the transition from SDG7’s goal to its targets—is indefensible because, as part of the overarching energy systems, energy technologies cannot be classified as simply right or wrong. Rather, the indicators and targets within a framework focused on sustainability need to be (more) context sensitive, meaning that, among other things, they may vary by country and with the available technology.


2006 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 83-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mozaffar Qizilbash

Philosophical accounts of human well-being face a number of significant challenges. In this paper, I shall be primarily concerned with one of these. It relates to the possibility, noted by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen amongst others, that people’s desires and attitudes are malleable and can ‘adapt’ in various ways to the straitened circumstances in which they live. If attitudes or desires adapt in this way it can be argued that the relevant desires or attitudes fail to provide a reliable basis for evaluating well-being. This is, what I shall call the ‘adaptation problem’. Nussbaum and Sen have—in different ways used this argument to motivate their versions of the ‘capability approach’. However, questions remain about the implications of adaptation for philosophical accounts of well-being.


2021 ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Icy Fresno Anabo ◽  
Iciar Elexpuru-Albizuri ◽  
Lourdes Villardón-Gallego

Author(s):  
Mario Biggeri ◽  
Jose Antonio Cuesta

Abstract Multidimensional child poverty (MDCP) and well-being measures are increasingly developed in the literature. Much more effort has gone to highlight the differences across measurement approaches than to stress the multiple conceptual and practical similarities across measures. We propose a new framework, the Integrated Framework for Child Poverty—IFCP––that combines three main conceptual approaches, the Capability Approach, Human Rights, and Basic Needs into an integrated bio-ecological framework. This integrated approach aims to bring more clarity about the concept and dynamics of multidimensional poverty and well-being and to disentangle causes from effects, outcomes from opportunities, dynamic from static elements, and observed from assumed behaviours. Moreover, the IFCP explains the MDCP dynamics that link the resources (goods and services), to child capabilities (opportunities) and achieved functionings (outcomes), and describes how these are mediated by the individual, social and environmental conversion factors as specified in the capability approach. Access to safe water is taken as a conceptual illustrative case, while the extended measurement of child poverty and well-being among Egyptian children ages 0 to 5 as an empirical example using IFCP. The proposed framework marks a step forward in understanding child poverty and well-being multidimensional linkages and suggesting desirable features and data requirements of MDCP and well-being measures.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farah Naz ◽  
Dieter Bögenhold

Disenchantment with traditional income-based measures of well-being has led to the search for alternative measures. Two major alternative measures of well-being come from subjective well-being research and the objective capability approach. The capability approach has been largely discussed in the context of development studies and economics and is mainly used within quantitative frameworks, but it also raises many questions that are worthy of discussion from a sociological perspective as well. This study opts for a qualitative approach to transpose capability approach in order to assess the well-being of female homeworkers in the football industry of Pakistan. The aim of this empirical research is to focus on the capabilities of homeworkers in accessing economic, individual, social and psychological aspects of well-being.


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