Improving rehabilitation effectiveness by enhancing the creative process.

Creativity is a tacit component of a rehabilitation program that must be exercised by a clinician to avoid stagnation of rehabilitative innovation. Enhancing creativity can improve rehabilitation effectiveness but requires a conscious effort on the part of a clinician. There are many components to encouraging the creative process, but few authors have grouped them into a single step-by-step process. The authors of this paper have developed the CLEAR method to enhancing creativity. This method represents a summation of various strategies offered in the literature and comprises five steps: 1) challenging old routines, 2) learning new attitudes, 3) enlisting idea-generation exercises, 4) assessing the new idea for safety, and 5) revising the idea so that it is safe and suitable for rehabilitation.