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A Global Agenda for Inclusive Recovery: Ensuring People with Intellectual Disabilities and Families are Included in a Post-COVID World

Inclusion International
June 2021

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This report documents the experience of exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences reveal pre-existing structural inequalities that affected the lives of people with intellectual disabilities and their families before COVID-19, during the pandemic, and beyond, and this report raises up the voices of those most excluded in a time of global crisis and demands an inclusive COVID-19 recovery.

 

This report includes the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and families across eight different issue areas. Across these themes, we examined how and why people with intellectual disabilities were left out and excluded in pandemic responses, what pre-existing conditions and inequalities contributed to their vulnerability and exclusion, and how future policy structures could begin to address both this immediate and systemic exclusion.

 

Together, these experiences and policy solutions form our global agenda for inclusive COVID-19 recovery, an action plan to ensure that government efforts to ‘build back better’ are inclusive of people with intellectual disabilities and their families.

Identifying Rehabilitation Workforce Strengths, Concerns and Needs: A Case Study from the Pacific Islands

GARGETT, Alexandra Lewis
LLEWELLYN, Gwynnyth
SHORT, Stephanie
KLEINITZ, Pauline
2016

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Purpose: This exploratory case study was undertaken to inform capacity development of the rehabilitation workforce in member nations of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).

 

Method: Participants at the 1st Pacific CBR Forum in June 2012 were key informants for this study. They comprised the disability focal points from government departments in each of the 14 countries, representatives of DPOs and disability service providers. The study was conducted in 3 phases:  a template to gather data on rehabilitation workers; key informant interviews; and, stakeholder workshops to identify strengths and needs of the rehabilitation workforce in the Pacific.

 

Results: The detailed case study findings suggest two critical drivers for rehabilitation health workforce development in the Pacific context. The first is leadership and commitment from government to serve rehabilitation needs in the community. The second is the urgent need to find alternative ways to service the demand for rehabilitation services as it is highly unlikely that the supply of specialist personnel will be adequate.

 

Conclusions: A multi-sectoral view of health and social service systems is a key element for the development of a rehabilitation health workforce. The endorsement of the WHO Global Disability Action Plan by the World Health Assembly in 2014 further enhances the opportunity to work collaboratively across sectors in Pacific countries. Specialist personnel are and will remain in short supply. There is opportunity for the region to lead the development of alternate workforce mechanisms through the training and supply of skilled community-based rehabilitation personnel.

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