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Persons with disabilities in rural India do not have the opportunity to lead a self-determined life and be included in their community as required by the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. To investigate their experience of living everyday life and the amount of agency they are able to exercise, in-depth interviews were undertaken. The Capability Approach (CA) was used to ana- lyse the situation that was seen in terms of outcome of the interplay between internal and external factors resulting in loss of agency. The results show that the dependency they experience due to lack of adequate support to undertake activities and being completely dependent on the family places them in a vicious circle of ‘self-worthlessness’. Reducing the dependency disabled people face and chang- ing perceptions of the community towards disability may break this circle.

Purpose

Telehealth provides psychotherapeutic interventions and psychoeducation for remote populations with limited access to in-person behavioural health and/or rehabilitation treatment. The United States Department of Défense and the Veterans Health Administration use telehealth to deliver primary care, medication management, and services including physical, occupational, and speech-language therapies for service members, veterans, and eligible dependents. While creative arts therapies are included in telehealth programming, the existing evidence base focuses on art therapy and dance/movement therapy, with a paucity of information on music therapy.

Methods

Discussion of didactic and applied music experiences, clinical, ethical, and technological considerations, and research pertaining to music therapy telehealth addresses this gap through presentation of three case examples. These programmes highlight music therapy telehealth with military-connected populations on a continuum of clinical and community engagement: 1) collaboration between Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA and the Acoke Rural Development Initiative in Lira, Uganda; 2) the Semper Sound Cyber Health programme in San Diego, CA; and 3) the integration of music therapy telehealth into Creative Forces®, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Results

These examples illustrate that participants were found to positively respond to music therapy and community music engagement through telehealth, and reported decrease in pain, anxiety, and depression; they endorsed that telehealth was not a deterrent to continued music engagement, requested continued music therapy telehealth sessions, and recommended it to their peers.

Conclusions

Knowledge gaps and evolving models of creative arts therapies telehealth for military-connected populations are elucidated, with emphasis on clinical and ethical considerations.

The CEO of Microsoft talks about the cultural embedding of accessibility in the company. Topics covered include: building accessibility into technology products; remote working and schooling (particularly in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic); skilling and jobs for people with disabilities; the growth of captioning; the US Americans with Disability Act (ADA); intersectionality; inclusivity; and the future of AI products.

In 2020 the Disability Royal Commission released an issues paper on group homes. The issues paper asked 10 questions based on some of the key issues and barriers experienced by people with disability living in Group Homes.

This is Women With Disabilities Australia (WWDA) response to the issues paper which highlights key recommendations to improve the lives and experiences of people with disability living in group homes. The recommendations stem from the following key areas:

• Living independently and being in the community
• Intersectionality
• Ableism, segregation and violence
• Exposing and responding to violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation

The quality of paid relationships is key for effective support, yet little is known about how people receiving and providing sup- port understand and experience the relationship. This paper reports on recent research that explored the role of relationships with paid support workers in strengthening the rights and well- being of young people with cognitive disability in Australia. The research used photo-rich participatory methods with 42 pairs of young people and their support workers and drew on Honneth’s recognition theory to specifically explore experiences of being valued, respected and cared about in their work together. The findings point to the importance of these con- nected aspects of recognition in paid support relationships, highlighting both the presence and absence of these, as well as experiences of misrecognition. The implications of recognition for strengthening support need close consideration in an inter- national context characterised by personalisation of support, resource constraints and inquiries into poor practice.

Official Development Assistance is a vital resource for realising the rights of persons with disabilities. In 2019, development partners spent 153 billion US dollars of ODA. Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Sustainable Development Goals, development partners are committed to make their ODA disability inclusive. And ODA is governed in a way that offers important advocacy opportunities for the disability movement. Taken together, these factors make ODA an essential resource for realising the CRPD. ODA can never be a substitute for national governments’ obligations to finance the rights of persons with disabilities, but it can make a very significant contribution in the short term. In fact, research in some countries has found ODA to be a much bigger source of finance for the rights of persons with disabilities than domestic government budgets.

The new ‘disability marker’ in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s database helps to answer how much ODA actually aims to be disability inclusive. Using the disability marker, every ODA project in the database is now sorted into one of 4 categories

This systematic review surveys the existing evidence surrounding the cost-effectiveness of interventions to address acute stroke in LMIC settings. Five databases were searched for articles related to the cost-effectiveness of emergency care interventions to treat acute stroke in LMICs.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.afjem.2020.05.009

African Journal of Emergency Medicine

Available online 11 June 2020
 

Exploring what the new normal will be when it comes to working, the risk in the response to the current crisis is that persons with disabilities will be left behind. How do we ensure that no one gets left behind in the “new normal” of working?

This session Making Inclusion the New Normal: Inclusive Workplace Practices as a Covid-19 Response as we discuss how we find new ways of working where no one gets left behind. #MakingInclusionTheNewNormal

A growing body of evidence shows that people with disabilities have historically been denied their sexual and reproductive health rights, despite having the same sexual and reproductive health needs as people without disabilities, and continue to face many barriers to accessing these lifesaving services.

This evidence gap map, developed as part of the UK Department for International Development’s Women’s Integrated Sexual Reproductive Health (WISH) programme, collates evidence on ‘what works’ to enable access to sexual reproductive health services for persons with disabilities in low and middle-income countries.