Disabilities may arise due to mental health conditions, physical injuries, or illness; an exhaustive medical assessment must be performed before making a claim for disability services Melbourne benefits. Disability Care is one of the most important topics to discuss.
Physicians frequently encounter barriers when providing care to people with disabilities. These may be procedural, policy, or financial in nature; or may relate to allocation of resources or perception of patient needs for clinical services.
Table of Contents
Defining a Disability Care
Disability can be an immensely complex and subjective experience that differs depending on who it affects and in what contexts. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal definition of a disability is “any physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more major life activities”. Unfortunately, this definition can be hard for some to grasp; its criteria keep changing depending on who’s making the call on what constitutes a disability and its effects vary over time and across contexts.
Disability cuts across class, race, gender, and ability lines and is particularly afflicting those living in poverty. Disability often results in other forms of inequality such as access to education or employment and poor living conditions that exacerbate its negative impacts.
At some point in their lives, nearly everyone will experience temporary or permanent disability. This includes people who have experienced injuries or illnesses without full access to health care services. When speaking about their disabilities, many prefer using “people-first” language that places the focus on individuals rather than conditions.
Medical Model
Many people start their disability journey by adopting what’s known as the medical model perspective, which sees disabilities as problems in people’s bodies that need fixing with medication or treatments. Unfortunately, this mindset often results in low expectations and disabled individuals losing independence, choice, and control over their lives. Furthermore, it often manifests in forms of ableism – the belief that disabled bodies and minds are less valuable than non-disabled counterparts.
The medical model approach to disability may lead to people being told it’s their impairments that prevent them from reaching their potential, rather than looking at how society excludes and oppresses all disabled people. This message can be particularly harmful when delivered by health professionals or service providers and could divert resources towards an exclusive medical focus rather than towards universal design and social inclusion initiatives.
Social Model
There are various models that can help us understand and explain disability, but the Social Model stands out as one of the more effective ones. It describes how disabled individuals can become disabling, providing a “road map” towards social change.
This approach recognizes that individuals are not disabled by virtue of their impairment or difference alone; rather, social perceptions, attitudes, institutions, and structures create disabilities – this approach is often known as the barriers approach.
For example: if a woman with physical impairment finds it hard to enter a restaurant with steps at its entrance, the Social Model would suggest adding ramps as a measure against her becoming disabled from using stairs herself. The same principle can be applied in employment, education, and other aspects of society; a stark difference from the Medical Model which often blames individual disabled people and seeks solutions.
Legal Model
Up until recently, philosophical discussions of models of disability-focused mainly on creating and interpreting definitions necessary to implement disability policy, with two-part definitions that link impairment with responses by society being the central theme.
Disability results from biological impairments; its disadvantage stems from their mismatch with society’s built physical environment and attitudinal norms/communication barriers. For example, someone living with mobility impairments might not be able to enter a building because there is no ramp.
Conclusion
Philosophers who cling closely to the minority group model may view ableist injustice in similar terms to racism and sexism. On the other hand, those sympathetic to social models will counter that this definition ignores paradigm cases of disability – those experiencing gross or net decreases in advantage caused by prejudicial phenomena such as stigmatization and exclusion – as well as mismatches between bodies designed for typicality and society built to accommodate them.
