About the project
The pandemic has disproportionately affected disabled people and people with long term health conditions. Not only are they more likely to experience life threatening symptoms and die of the virus, but information and services during this period have not been made accessible to different impairment groups. This means that many disabled people have not had the necessary information they need to stay safe, and make informed decisions about their health during the pandemic.
From January to July 2021, Real undertook an outreach project – together with their project partners deafPLUS, ICM Foundation,and Healthwatch – to ascertain what barriers different groups of disabled people had encountered in accessing and understanding Covid-19 information and services. The participants then co-produced recommendations as to how these services and information could be improved.
The outreach for this project was conducted using a variety of means to maximise inclusion and representation from different impairment groups. These included: 25 coproduction workshops, over 80 1-1 phone calls, and completed surveys from over 200 disabled residents. As part of the project, we have produced a Best Practice Guide for health professionals.
Best Practice Guide
The need for the best practice guide emerged after participants repeatedly reported that frontline staff and medical professionals lacked training in how to meet their access needs, make reasonable adjustments and adequately support them. Too often health services and information are designed without any consultation with disabled people, meaning the environment is often not accessible, and staff lack the knowledge and skills to communicate effectively.
This lack of coproduction with disabled people in shaping health services has resulted in them not receiving equal access to healthcare. It is a legal requirement to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and ensure health information is converted into accessible formats for all patients.
Or email hello@real.org.uk if you’d like to receive the guide in a different format for access reasons.
The findings from this study are illuminating and clearly demonstrate disabled people had been left out of the Covid narrative. Firstly, the Accessible Information Standard – that aims to ensure disabled people are given information they understand – was not enforced. This has resulted in many disabled people not receiving vital safety information relating to Covid. Secondly, the Disability Equality Act 2010 has not been upheld. Lack of accessibility to Covid health services, including vaccine and test centres, has placed disabled people at a direct disadvantage of recovering equal healthcare, which contravenes the State’s duty ‘to make reasonable adjustments’.
Disabled Voices: Learning from Covid
On the 5th August, Real organised an online event with its project partners to share the findings from this engagement project. The event was attended by project participants, public health officials and other key figures working with disabled people in Tower Hamlets. The findings from this project are deeply concerning, and shine a light on the deep inequalities experienced by disabled people in accessing health and social care services. However, they also offer hope, as the key recommendations, which are co-produced with local disabled people provide us with the opportunity to implement structural changes to the way services are shaped and delivered.
As part of the event, we shared personal stories from 6 participants of the project – these testimonies provide a glimpse into some of the inequalities experienced by disabled people during the pandemic.
You can watch the testimonies from Beatrix, Mahendra and Faiz here
You can watch the testimonies from Lisa, Sam and a member of deafPLUS here
Our partners have also produced a number of resources during this project:
Healthwatch: North East London Report – Voices of Disabled residents and Covid-19
ICM Foundation:
1. Easy read poster produced by CORE Projects trainees
3. Covid-19 Health messaging video: How to be safe when going out
Get involved
There are lots of different ways to get involved and support this project moving forward:
- If you are a disability organisation we haven’t worked with yet, help us run a co-production workshop with your members to ensure their voices are heard too
- If you are a health professional, help us escalate these issues to decision makers and integrate the recommendations into your own work places
- If you are a disabled person, or a person with a long term health condition, get in touch and join one of our workshops or have a 1-1 chat with us to help us create solutions to implement these important recommendations
- If you have any other ideas about how to support this project, please do also get in touch