Azernews.Az

By Nigar Orujova

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has reviewed the Rehabilitation Center for Disabled after repair and reconstruction in Baku.

Labor and Social Protection Minister Salim Muslimov informed the head of state of the conditions created in the center.

He said that the center provides rehabilitation and treatment for the disabled in ambulatory, day stationary and stationary conditions.

The center is supplied with state-of-the-art medical equipment.

After reviewing the center, President Aliyev gave relevant instructions and recommendations.

Earlier last week, President Aliyev signed a decree on improving the system used to assess disabilities.

The president ordered the creation of a subsystem of medical examination and rehabilitation within the centralized information system of the Labor and Social Protection Ministry to increase transparency in the assessment of disability, expand the use of modern information technologies, as well as to improve the quality of services for medical examination and rehabilitation.

The Cabinet of Ministers has been given two months to make the first degree of disability category permanent, and do so for the second and third degrees of disability only in exceptional cases under medical guidance.

The president also ordered his cabinet to amend the criteria for determining disability, given the lengthening of the terms of appointment of the second and third degrees of disability for a period of at least five years and to reduce the number of repeated evaluations.

The overall number of disabled people in Azerbaijan was 535,000 as of December 2014, which makes some 5 percent of the whole population of the nine million country.