Psychosocial rehabilitation includes the following techniques: Person oriented psychology, group psychotherapy, psychological testing for families with special tools to assess behaviors and relations, family psychotherapy with a therapeutic tool tailored to a person for a full family (i.e., with both parents and children) having the husband with MS or the wife with MS, tailored techniques for broken families, for singles, consultations of a sexuality doctor to improve the condition as appropriate. Within the frames of psychosocial rehabilitation, regional branches of the RuMSS are staffed with medical and social psychologists, psychotherapists, who run consultations for PwMS in medical institutions, facilities based on the regional MS organization, and domestically. The RUMSS actively cooperates with the agency ‘Family Service’ and other state-run establishments.

Social and medical rehabilitation includes the next areas: Physio-rehabilitation services (kinesiotherapy, physio-therapeutic interventions, therapeutic interventions by means of dealing with animals – for instance, hippotherapy), drug treatment and monitoring systems to assess the quality performance of functional systems (body coordination, muscles strength, walking ability, etc.). Objectives of nonprofits are to ensure the accessibility of social and medical rehabilitation assistance to patients, arrangements for cooperation between medical, scientific and government agencies to introduce new rehabilitation techniques.

Social and everyday life rehabilitation includes the next areas: Everyday life services in package (e.g. of a barber/hairdresser, manicurist and chiropodist, cosmetologist, dentist, trichologist, make-up designer, osteopath-vertebralist), teaching of skills to use rehabilitation means, teaching of skills of self-maintenance. Since the social and everyday life rehabilitation aims at involving a person with MS as much as possible in socially active life, to implement it requires a range of activities: to inform the patient about available social and everyday life services, to provide him/her with essential knowledge and to teach skills to compensate for gone functions and to re-adapt to new realities of life, to ensure patients have rehabilitation devices, to promote barrier-free environment principles, to promote leisure rehabilitation.

Occupational and civil rehabilitation includes learning work skills, consulting by professionals of employment services, legal assistance, workshops on legal basic issues, ‘vacancy fairs’.

According to domestic statistics, up to 82% of people with MS have to leave their jobs, which reveals the vast social significance of the problem. The RuMSS lays stress upon occupational rehabilitation of people with MS, because retaining one’s current job or retraining for another job is a vital factor to influence the quality of life of a person, his/her emotional, social and economic status.

The RuMSS creates jobs for people with MS in the federal structure (national MS organization) and regional voluntary organizations (its branches). With the RuMSS active participation, there is activity on training and re-training organized for employees. In close collaboration with employment services, people with MS get temporarily employed with a prospect to get a permanent job eventually. Since January 2011, the interactive service of personnel started working; this department, based on filled questionnaires, employs people with MS in other organizations as well as it accumulates business ideas. A crucial point is that now in accordance with the legislation, members of PwMS’ families may officially agree with authorities to care after an MS patient with severe disabilities in the family, who is unable to live independently, as a social job, which is beneficial to the family budget and improves the quality of lives of family members. Read more about rehabilitation in Russia