Welcome to the website for the 2010 North American Collaborating Center Conference on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, the ICF.

The North American Collaborating Center (NACC) invites you to participate in the 2010 NACC ICF Conference, to be conducted on Wednesday and Thursday, June 23 and 24, 2010, on the campus of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

The NACC is an expert center in health classifications, coding, and terminology development, representing the United States and Canada in a Network of Collaborating Centers for the WHO Family of International Classifications
(WHO-FIC). The Collaborating Center works to maintain and broaden awareness about the suite of WHO classifications in North America, including the ICF and the International Classification of Diseases, the ICD. The agency partners are the Canadian Institute of Health Information, Statistics Canada, and the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since the mid-1990s, the NACC has sponsored a series of Conferences about the ICF and functional status classification, in both Canada and the U.S.  We are pleased to resume the ICF Conference series in 2010.

The theme for this year's NACC ICF Conference will be "Enhancing Our Understanding of the ICF."

This year's ICF Conference is a component of a series of events commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS).

The NCVHS has addressed many issues related to the classification of functional status, especially during this decade, focusing on the needs for efficiently transmitting data and compiling statistics about individual and population-level functional status. The National Committee has advocated for adopting the ICF as the standard nomenclature for describing and summarizing health conditions that involve either functional impairment, activity limitation, or participation restriction.

If you have an idea for a poster presentation about some of your current research or applications using the ICF, in Canada, the U.S., or around the world, or involving commentary about the ICF or the new ICF-CY, please consider submitting an Abstract for our Poster Session.

There will be no registration fee to attend the NACC ICF Conference in person.  We want to encourage as many people as possible to attend the ICF Conference in Bethesda. The Natcher Conference Center is comfortable and accessible for persons with disabilities. We are also planning a simultaneous NIH Videocast of portions of our ICF Conference, direct from our conference room in Bethesda. There will be no registration fee to watch this Videocast. Participants in the Videocast audience will be able to submit questions electronically by E-Mail during the lectures.

Even though it will be free to attend the 2010 NACC ICF Conference, we will ask everyone who would like to attend in person in Bethesda to pre-register on the Registration web page in this ICF Conference website, so that we can plan accordingly. No pre-registration is necessary for participating in the NIH Videocast. Details about logging on to the NIH Videocast on the conference days will be posted on this ICF Conference website in the near future, so please check back.