Interdisziplinarer Arbeitskreis Bewegungsstorungen (IAB): an interdisciplinary working group for promoting multimodal therapy of movement disorders

Increasing complexity of therapeutic strategies for movement disorders (MD) requires multimodal therapies involving various health care professionals and physicians. Coordinating all professions involved is difficult. An interdisciplinary working group (Interdisziplinarer Arbeitskreis Bewegungsstorungen, IAB) serves to promote and improve multimodal therapies of MD. IAB was started 6 years ago in Hamburg, Germany as an interdisciplinary special interest group with about 25 physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, nurse specialists, physicians and invited guests regularly meeting each quarter. IAB expanded and now also includes a webpage with data bases, a special interest group for Parkinson assistants, a meeting arm for organising meetings accredited by continuous medical education authorities and a publication arm for production of educational materials including a communication form and a communication calendar developed by IAB. Recently, IAB acquired a video production enterprise producing educational MD videos. In the meantime, two more IAB groups were founded in other regions of Germany. IAB's stability over more than 6 years and its expansion into more regions and other tasks documents the demand for promotion of multimodal therapies for MD.