Globalization is present in all human activities, Medicine and PRM included! It's urgent to complement our training as physiatrists with the experience of working in centers with different approaches and methods.

Starting from the motto of the XII ISPRM Congress: “Share knowledge to reduce disabilities”, was born the ideia of sharing our experience and knowledge from the confrontation of two international realities of PRM.

This work intends to address the main differences, whether organizational, infrastructure, of clinical practice or even of economic character existing between the Portuguese reality and the New Zealander, based on an internship carried out by a portuguese PRM resident in a rehabilitation center for patients with acquired brain injury in New Zealand (NZ).

Portugal (PT) and NZ are geographically antipodes, but not so in rehabilitation terms. In NZ there's a different organization of the rehabilitation network, with focus on the rapid adaptation to community life with a pronounced role of community physiotherapy. There is no chronologic limit to the rehab process, only dictated by the clinical evolution, while in PT, regarding economic factors and the reduced number of rehab beds in relation to the needs, there is often a pressure for the patient discharge.

The medical appointment is less coloquial and distant in NZ, maybe by cultural factors, with more time (1hour in NZ and 15minutes in PT), providing a better doctor–patient relationship. In PT there are other medical specialities in rehab centers like internal medicine, which is a important for patients with more co-morbilities.

The process of rehabilitation itself and the focus on achieving the greatest possible functionality is common to both countries and to the specialty itself, so the confontration of the two realities, taking the most positive aspects of each will contribute to the PRM improvement!