Professor Farees (Fary) Khan is a rehabilitation physician with 20+ years’ experience specialising in complex medical management due to neurological, musculoskeletal and cancer related disability.
She is the elected Vice President of the International Society of Physical & Rehabilitation Medicine (ISPRM) at their Annual Scientific Congress in Lisbon, Portugal 2022 (her nomination endorsed by 72 National Rehabilitation Medicine Societies, in all WHO regions). She is also the current Inaugural Academic Fellow to the Board of the Australian Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine (AFRM), Royal Australian College of Physicians (RACP), and Elected Board Member of the Rehabilitation Medicine Society of Australia & New Zealand (RMSANZ). In January 2022, Fary was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her extraordinary service to rehabilitation medicine and research. This prestigious award is given in recognition of her significant contributions to the advancement in developing rehabilitation medicine and consistent contribution to building evidence-based practices in rehabilitation (>450 scientific publications), promoting community-based rehabilitation programs and various models for health service delivery, developing measurement and clinical outcome evaluation, innovation in disability-related healthcare, building global capacity in rehabilitation medicine and leading the international task force for developing disaster relief for rehabilitation services.
She is lead for the Rehabilitation ‘Flying Faculty’, an interdisciplinary team that deploys to low income countries to assist with the development of rehabilitation education, capacity building and health service delivery. In the last decade alone, this team has visited places like Madagascar, Mongolia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Morocco, Indonesia, Thailand and others.
She was awarded the Sydney Licht Award by the ISPRM in 2018 for her contribution to rehabilitation medicine, The Haim Ring Award in 2020 for education and capacity building efforts and The Joel A. DeLisa Lectureship Award-2021, by the Association of Academic Physiatrists (AAP) USA and many others. She is currently the Australian Representative (AFRM) for the Asia-Oceania Society of Physical and Medical Rehabilitation. She was an Executive member of various national and international committees including the WHO-ISPRM Liaison Committee, the UN-ISPRM Liaison Committee, Women’s Health Task Force, Cancer Rehabilitation Network ISPRM, RMSANZ Disaster Rehabilitation-SIG, and others.
She just ended her tenure as the Chair of the Disaster Rehabilitation Committee, ISPRM. In the last 4 years as the DRC Chair, she advocated for the rehabilitation medicine perspective in minimizing disability, optimizing function and health-related quality of life in persons who sustain a traumatic injury, and those with a pre-existing disability during natural or human-made disasters.
Some of the key achievements under her leadership included (but are not limited to): supporting member state society response to disasters, providing education and training resources on rehabilitation disaster management, hosting disaster rehabilitation sessions at professional meetings, representing and assisting with the WHO (Emergency Medical Team Initiative), conducting rehabilitation research and building evidence for rehabilitation in disasters. Further, her work in refugee health care and promoting rehabilitation services in low-income countries in the region is highly regarded.