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I'm temporarily part of what is humorously called the "UN family" myself, working at the (WHO) on the World Report on Disability and Rehabilitation.

This document picks up where the - which I wrote about in last month's column - left off. Our team are meant to be summarising the world situation in terms of impairment and disability - organising information ranging from how many disabled people there are on the planet, to how provision of assistive technology and support services works, through to access to employment and education globally. An international team of authors have been beavering away at twelve chapters, which we are now compiling into a draft which goes forward to regional consultation through May and June. Our Report is an unusual endeavour for WHO, because we are concentrating on measures to promote the participation and inclusion of disabled people, whereas the organisation normally spends its time trying to eliminate blindness, deafness and other conditions.

Geneva may be an unusual city, but WHO is like nowhere else I've ever worked. The staff includes every nationality under the sun, speaking all possible languages, so walking down the seemingly endless corridors is a bit like being on the Starship Enterprise: I'm fairly sure I spotted a Klingon last week. I'm also getting a lot of exercise thanks to having to undertake long searches for the right bureaucrat to get travel reimbursements authorised, or trying to locate the particular official I am meant to be meeting with.

There seem to be very few other disabled people around, and one of my secondary aims is to try and help WHO become more welcoming to disabled staff. The lifts work (albeit I can't always reach the button for my floor) and people are friendly, but other access issues are more problematic. My desk goes up and down, which is diverting, but it's proved more complicated finding an office chair to fit my physique. My wheelchair-using colleague is resigned to her certain extinction if the building ever catches fire, although Security are so concerned about how to get her out in an emergency that they won't even let her into the place outside office hours.

Nor is it straightforward to write a comprehensive and all-embracing document on disability. Finding experts who can summarise a particular situation for the whole range of impairments, across every region of the world, is almost impossible. We are trying especially hard to ensure that the Report reflects the experience of developing countries, where the majority of disabled people live and where problems of poverty and social exclusion are most extreme. WHO colleagues developed the (ICF) as a way of bridging the and , and we are working to support every author in reflecting this precisely in what he or she writes.

Even agreeing on how many disabled people there are in the world is fraught with political and scientific controversy: the usual suggestion is 650 million, but of course it all depends on how you define impairment, and the figures in different countries vary widely. Colleagues were very excited last week to have agreed a global prevalence figure of 15-17% of the population being disabled. I was a little less impressed, given that I think the question "How many disabled people are there?" is about as useful as "How long is a piece of string?"

Nor does terminology translate smoothly into different languages. My current task is to try and steer a route through the ethical minefield of impairment prevention - not so easy when many languages cannot easily capture the English distinction between 'impairment' and 'disability'.

As a professional sceptic, I am never sure what difference UN Conventions and World Reports actually make, as I observed last month. But it's a nice change to be out of an academic environment and helping to write documents which governments and policy-makers will actually read and hopefully act upon. And my current, temporary, lifestyle has a couple of other distinct advantages over being back home in Newcastle: better restaurants, and supermarkets to die for. I feel a fondue coming on ...