Person-centredness has an ancient pedigree, but its application in the field of rehabilitation raises both practical and theoretical difficulties. It may be that rehabilitation might get a better sense of what it should be and should do by focusing less on the rhetoric of person-centredness and by putting more emphasis on the investigation and operationalization of its key conceptual components.

In some ways, the challenge rehabilitation faces is the need to transpose and adapt a notion (person-centredness) that has emerged from fields that are in fact unrelated to disability such as, for example, clinical psychology. The difficulties encountered are therefore not so much related to the particular dominance of a 'medical model' in rehabilitation than they are to the complexities of the concept of disability. We argue that one way forward might be to clarify further the respective role of the medical and non-medical aspects of rehabilitation in ways that go beyond what has been already achieved in either the ICIDH or ICF but which is still unsatisfactory or incomplete in many respects.