Commentaries from the APHA Disability Section - Chair's ForumEvolving views of disability and public health: The roles of advocacy and public health
Section snippets
Evolving perspectives on disability in public health
The historical public health perspective of primary prevention of disability has evolved to recognizing people with disabilities as legitimate and valued participants in society. This is stated explicitly in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, signed by the United States in 2009 [8]. Drum and colleagues [9, p. 126] recently outlined 3 distinct perspectives of disability within public health that successively incorporate health-related quality of life
The public health process and advocacy
The public health process has been portrayed as a cycle involving surveillance of a health phenomenon, epidemiologic research, and intervention that, in turn, come back to surveillance of outcomes. Evaluation occurs throughout this process. Similar stages were recently depicted by Kilbourne and her colleagues [23]. Not typically included in this process, however, is the important role of advocacy. Historically, advocacy brought attention to the plight of people with disabilities and provided
Conclusion
There have been substantial improvements in how people with disabilities are considered and treated in the past 25 years in the United States. This progress has come about through legal and legislative advocacy that resulted in significant social policies to promote the education, health, and participation of people with disabilities. While legislation has increased educational access through Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of
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2022, Disability and Health JournalCitation Excerpt :For instance, any programs and materials to support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities during pregnancy should include them in the development and evaluation to ensure accessibility and appropriateness. Researchers have emphasized the importance of collaboration with the disability community, noting that people with disabilities contributed advocacy perspectives and lived experience of disability to research, policies, and programs.49 Such collaboration is essential to effectively addressing disparities and unmet needs.
A Socio-Ecological Approach to Understanding the Perinatal Care Experiences of People with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities in Ontario, Canada
2021, Women's Health IssuesCitation Excerpt :In contrast to a biomedical model that emphasizes individual characteristics and in turn individual-level interventions (e.g., health behavior change), the SEM acknowledges higher-level factors that shape care experiences and outcomes (Sword, 1999). The SEM is also aligned with the social determinants of health framework, wherein instead of being understood as an individual problem, disability is one of many determinants of health (Krahn & Campbell, 2011). To understand the perinatal care experiences of people with IDD and ultimately improve them, there is a need to consider stigma and how other social determinants of health, systems of oppression, and identities, such as race/racism, gender identity, and geography, may interact with or compound experiences of marginalization for people with IDD and shape their perinatal care experiences.
The configuration of job placement for people with disabilities in the current economic contingencies in Italy: Social and clinical implications for health
2015, Disability and Health JournalCitation Excerpt :Therefore, measures aimed to act on changing interactions in the direction of cooperation and participation are required39,40 to overcome those old strategies still associated with individual types of disability, which could affirm and consolidate the differences rather than trigger a process of change.41,42 This means modifying the overall architecture, which in these socio-historical circumstances proved to be inappropriate for the management of those aspects that are urgently in need of being solved.43 Another requirement that emerged is the need for integrating the parties involved in networking that would allow various companies to communicate with each other in order to trigger the central corpus of implementing the law of the system of convention.44
Clinical preventive service use disparities among subgroups of people with disabilities: A scoping review
2014, Disability and Health JournalCitation Excerpt :These limitations include relying on convenience samples or using service recipients as the sampling frame.52,53 Among population-based surveys, people with intellectual disabilities in particular have often been excluded, resulting in several calls for a national health surveillance system for individuals with intellectual disabilities to assist in setting a public health agenda.53,54 These factors contribute to a general lack of confidence in many of the published findings associated with health care access disparities experienced by individuals with disabilities, or prevent publication of these findings altogether.55
Research contributions and implications
2014, Disability and Health JournalIntegration of chronic disease and disability and health state programs in Montana
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Financial disclosure: The authors have no financial disclosures to report.
The findings and conclusions in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors gratefully acknowledge the audience comments at the APHA 2009 Chair's Forum and comments of Michael Fox and Charles Drum to an earlier draft of this paper.