Until a few years ago, there were no specially designed rehabilitation centres for children and adolescents in Austria. For this reason, in 2010, a separate department for child and adolescent rehabilitation was set up, which calculated the need for inpatient rehabilitation places for children and adolescents in Austria in cooperation with the "Gesundheit Österreich GmbH". The surveys indicated a need for a total of 343 beds for 11 indicator groups and an additional 50 beds for parents and siblings in four supply zones in Austria by 2020. Against this background, the aim of this report was to provide an overview of international evaluation methods and (standardised) evaluation instruments that can be used for future evaluations of the Austrian child and adolescent rehabilitation programs.

A systematic literature search was conducted in five databases. Furthermore, an extended manual search was made on websites of child and adolescent rehabilitation centres, institutions that carry out the evaluations of such centres, social security funds, etc. Overall, the searches yielded 1,107 hits. 56 full texts review sources resulted in 18 included qualitative synthesis studies (seven cross-indication and eleven indication-specific studies) according to the pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria.

In the 18 studies, eight generic endpoints were collected by using different (standardised or self-developed) measurement instruments. Indication-specific outcomes were only reported in the studies for four indications namely traumatic brain injury, obesity, diabetes and eating disorder. Regarding the evaluation results, the studies presented heterogeneous results on three generic endpoints (psychological well-being, quality of life and self-management /-efficacy). For the remaining generic and indication-specific endpoints, the studies showed positive effects in the course of the rehabilitation program.

Overall, the eight identified generic endpoints include essential content for the evaluation of child and adolescent rehabilitation programs. In the end, the selection of the measuring instruments depends largely on the framework conditions of the evaluation, such as indication, self- vs. external assessment, language and duration of implementation. However, before choosing an instrument during an evaluation, the psychometric validity (reliability and normalisation) of the instrument should always be evaluated. In addition to the generic perspective, the evaluation of disease-specific endpoints is also recommended.