Only a Day? We Celebrate International Day of People With Disabilities All Year!
Every year the International Day of People with Disabilities takes place on December 3. However, when you are an organization that has been around for as long as we have, you celebrate it every day, all year long!
This year the theme is “Inclusion matters: access and empowerment for people of all abilities.” There are an estimated one billion people with disabilities living in the world, all of which still face obstacles and barriers to inclusion, health care, and justice. Did you know that people with disabilities around the world also have less access to health care than the general population?
The CDC indicates that people with disabilities have poorer overall health and have less access to good health care. So how can we help decrease the barriers that face people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD)?
In our webinar, “Identifying and Improving Barriers to Healthcare for Individuals with IDD,” Dr. Meg Traci, Ph.D., discusses the barriers that confront the IDD community when accessing adequate health care. She not only addresses the barriers but offers techniques to resolve them. For further information, check out our other webinar on barriers in health promotion, “Barriers to Health Promotion for Persons with Disabilities.”
While there are plenty of barriers to health care, there are always ways that we can improve access for all people.
What about you? How are you helping to improve access and empowerment of people with IDD? Although you can’t solve every issue in at one time, the important thing is to get involved!
Get involved by:
- contacting your local chapter of The Arc to volunteer
- helping us take action on a key issue that matters most to you
- holding a community event or house party in your community to raise awareness of the issues the IDD community faces or perhaps to screen one of the webinars on barriers to health care!
Here are some great steps to see your event come to life in your own community:
Good luck celebrating and organizing your community to promote inclusion of people with disabilities!
