EDITOR'S PAGE

With the dawn of the new millenium, rehabilitation has evolved from being confined to institutions, to being accessible for clients at their door step. Along with this trend of rapid progress in service delivery, there were also changes in the community's attitude towards people with disabilities. Through legislation and lobbying, people in many countries have succeeded in making their disabled citizens equal members in society. They have thus moved away from the earlier approaches of charity and welfare to one of rights. These changes have left a great impact on community based rehabilitation practices also.

One cannot assume anymore that service provision in itself is a 'job well done'. Today it is a question of how much and how well one has achieved the goals, rather than how often an activity was repeated. Because, unlike earlier years, disabled persons can now demand quality services if what they receive is of poor quality. It means that a service can be discredited if it does not produce the results that were intended, because the community may lose its opportunity to access a better option. Many countries are beginning to establish standards of 'good practice' in rehabilitation, such as the Rehabilitation Council of India, which standardises training programmes. In the light of these changes, CBR practitioners at the project level will have to update their intervention and management skills on a regular basis in order to avoid obsolescence. But in a developing field like CBR, it is sometimes a great effort to access relevant information because of the paucity of published literature. The Friday Meetings and the Friday Meeting Transactions are efforts to fill this void to some extent. Yet their effectiveness is limited due to lack of interest and lack of writing skills of field level practitioners. Many NGOs are also not good at perceiving impending changes in advance. CBR will change in the future from small, charitable experiments to national strategies, requiring specialised and effective skills and credibility of results. At such a point in time, many CBR projects which have not kept abreast of the changes, will become irrelevant. This newsletter and the Friday Meetings are attempts in a small way, to prepare CBR practitioners to change according to the new trends. This issue of the newsletter is delayed deliberately by a month to avoid any disruptions due to Y2K problems. The Editorial team wishes all our readers a very Happy New Year!

Friday Meeting Transactions is an associate publication of the Asia Pacific Disability Rehabilitation Journal. It generates its articles from the summary reports of the transactions of the Friday Meetings held on the last Friday of every odd month at Ashirvad, 30, St. Mark's Road Cross, Bangalore - 560 001, India, and articles from other authors. It is useful for trainers and policy makers, and is available on the Internet at the same website as the Asia Pacific Disability Rehabilitation Journal.

`Friday Meetings' were initiated to improve access to knowledge for development organisations, particularly those involved in non-institutional forms of rehabilitation. These meetings which are held on the last Friday of every odd month, such as January, March, May and so on, are a get together of like minded people to debate themes related to application of different methods and development of skills, in this field. All those who are interested are welcome to attend. The meetings are always conducted at the same venue on the last Friday of odd months, between 2 pm and 5 pm. After an initial presentation on a theme, the emphasis is on discussion between the participants. The opinions generated here can be useful to people who are decision makers, researchers and interventionists.