The global attitude towards disability is one which many people have questioned over the years. What kind of work is being done to ensure that people who do have a disability are getting the support they need? What can be done to help these people succeed despite their disabilities? The answer is that there are seemingly changes being made on a regular basis.
September 14th 2022, was the 72nd session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe. During the session, more than 53 countries put a framework into place which has been designed to offer people with disabilities the highest levels of accessibility and the best standard of living. It was a move which was heralded as being long overdue.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that health and wellness became a big topic for people to talk about, and there were a lot of people who wanted to make sure that life became a lot more disability-inclusive, especially at some of the higher levels of life. Things like corporate and governmental worlds were redesigned with inclusivity as a key consideration.
For example, a lot of effort was made to help people living in Ukraine – a country with more than 2.7 million disabled people living in the area before Russia invaded. WHO has recently stepped up in a big way and put long-term support options in place to try and help with the rehabilitation and support of people with disabilities, helping them readjust back into normal life. After all, these are the groups who unfortunately suffered the most during the crisis, as disabled people are frequently the most forgotten about.
Naturally, the hope is that it won’t take the firing of missiles to make a change in years to come, but it does provide us with valuable insight into the way that the government handles this type of situation.
One positive is that there are definitely a lot more efforts taking place on smaller but still important scales. For example, a lot of effort has been made to give disabled people more options in job roles, like, for example John McFall, who is a Paralympic champion-level athlete who recently became the first disabled astronaut for the European Space Agency.
As disability workers Gold Coast, we are naturally very happy to see these changes take place. We have felt for a long time that there needs to be much more inclusivity and attempts to be inclusive in things like job roles and generally improving everyday life to be much more accessible for people with disabilities, so information like this is always positive to hear. It should be clear to see that there are quite a few positive changes taking place, and while we are not immediately at the point where things are equal, we are taking the right steps to get there. Hopefully, with a few more years of changes, we will see positive growth on a permanent and large scale.