Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
After a workplace accident left her with a disability at age twenty two, a Toronto nurse who had spent years training to care for patients found herself shut out of decisions about her own care. Conversations about her treatment took place around her while she was given no part in them. Her repeated reports that her pain was worsening went unheard, and she was told to wait or to push through. People with Disabilities are treated this way again and again inside healthcare, present yet excluded, talked about rather than listened to, and seen as a case to be processed rather than a full person to be heard. Being shut out of decisions about her own care made plain a reality that People with Disabilities live every single day.
Before her own injury, she had not noticed the barriers that People with Disabilities meet inside healthcare and throughout daily public life. Once she began living them, those barriers became impossible to ignore. They had always been present, unseen only by people who never had reason to confront them. This is not a matter of isolated oversight. Barriers that block full participation are built into the systems People with Disabilities must use, and removing those barriers calls for deliberate and sustained commitment from everyone who designs and runs them.
Getting adequate care forced her to become a constant advocate for herself, returning again and again to appointments, insisting that her pain was real and worsening, and resisting dismissal at every turn. She has been direct about the cost of this. People with Disabilities must advocate for themselves far more than others ever realize, and that demand is heaviest precisely when pain and exhaustion have already drained them. People without disabilities are not required to fight to be believed simply to receive care. That unequal weight falls on People with Disabilities, and organized advocacy grounded in their own voices is what shifts it.
When People with Disabilities tell their own stories in public, others find them. What began as one person posting online about chronic pain and the barriers she met in healthcare became a gathering place where People with Disabilities recognized one another, named the realities they shared, and reminded each other that they are real people who deserve to be heard, not merely a diagnosis. Community Builders carry that same shared responsibility and collective obligation, owned personally by each of us and acted on together. The work is to build communities where People with Disabilities are never talked about without being included, but are centered in every decision that concerns them. Hear People with Disabilities speak for themselves.
Read the Full Article: Former Nurse Says Becoming Disabled Opened Her Eyes to How Often Patients Feel Dismissed (Exclusive).
By: Jordan Greene
