Lancashire & South Cumbria Library Blog

Getting our voices heard

Disabled people face poorer experiences of – and worse access to – health and care services than people who aren’t disabled and these health inequalities have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this context, it’s vitally important to include disabled people in planning, designing and developing health and care services. This King’s Fund long read, with Disability Rights UK sets out what we found out about how disabled people are currently involved in health and care service design, and what good might look like.

Key messages include:

• 60 per cent of those who died from Covid-19 in the first year of the pandemic were disabled. The health inequalities disabled people already faced were made worse by the pandemic and a decade of austerity. In this context, it’s vitally important to include disabled people in designing and planning health and care system responses.
• Health and care services need to understand the broad diversity of disabled people’s identities and experiences, and adopt a social model approach to disability, understanding that people are disabled by barriers in society, rather than by impairments or health conditions.
• Health and care professionals need to value disabled people’s expertise through properly recognising the value of lived experience and ensure disabled people’s voices are central to any plans right from the start.
• Disabled health and care staff are potential partners in this work, with their perspectives of both using and delivering services.
• Disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) can strengthen their impact by working with other local DPOs and user-led organisations, understanding which parts of health and care systems they can best influence, and supporting health and care organisations to meaningfully engage with disabled people.
• Both health and care organisations and DPOs need to improve their understanding of how people’s multiple identities shape their experiences, and embrace diversity of voices, opinions and challenges as an opportunity to think differently.
• Ensuring disabled people’s voices are heard requires constant attention. While there are some examples of good practice, we heard many stories we heard where involvement wasn’t happening or felt tokenistic.

(The King’s Fund)