The third public hearing of the Disability Royal Commission heard from a wide range of people with disability, advocates, families and academics, who all told of failures in health care that are leading to the deaths of disabled people.
The hearing heard directly from people with intellectual disability about what they had experienced, and how they had been treated.
A great way to catch up on the hearings is in the daily blogs from the NSW Council on Intellectual Disability. Another way is to look at the transcripts and videos on the Disability Royal Commission website.
I wrote for Eureka Street about the hearing, and the medical model of disability.
Saying the medical system runs on the medical model of disability seems self evident, and yet that’s at the heart of much of what has been talked about in these latest hearings. The medical model locates the ‘problem’ of disability firmly in the disabled person, and the expertise to fix that ‘problem’ within the health professional and health system. The disability rights movement has long fought for a social model of disability to be at the heart of how we think about ourselves — what would a social model of health care look like?
