The international organizations—United Nations

Abstract

I am very pleased to join with you today and to have an opportunity to discuss the role of United Nations organizations in the field of prosthetics and orthotics and, more generally, of the rehabilitation of disabled persons. As a former Deputy Administrator of the United States Veterans Administration I have had some direct working responsibility for the welfare of disabled persons. I know just a little of your marvellous work and I have seen too much of the desperate plight of handicapped people in the developing countries not to believe that we in the United Nations development system must intensify our efforts in all possible ways to help those hundreds of millions of people. In the widest and longer-term context, our efforts of course must be preventive-the very process of integrated and co-ordinated development is one that seeks to eradicate the C U U S ~ J of many forms of disability. Thus, for example, the United Nations Development Programme is working with the World Health Organization and the World Bank, and many bilateral donors, in seven African countries both to eradicate the tiny blackfly that produces onchocerciasis river blindness-and to build up an integrated development programme for the entire area as it becomes safe for human settlement. In the same way, UNDP and WHO have launched a major new attack on the six great tropical diseases that kill, debilitate and disable millions of people. Our work in the drive to increase production of nutritious food in the developing countries, including applied research in plant genetics to breed into grain crops for a higher nutritional value, will also serve to cut back nutrition*] causes of disablement. A new concentration on problems of providing safe water for every village in the world by 1990, one of the goals set by the recent United Nations Water Conference, will yet again progressively reducc causes of the effects which you who are specialists in rehabilitation must cope with. But I am fully aware that all these massive longer-term development efforts do not reach to the hundreds of millions who are already disabled, or day by day are being born with handicaps, or are becoming afflicted as children and adults. Let me therefore shorten the perspective, and try to give you a brief overview of United Nations work more directly in rehabilitation. Under the Administrative Committee on Co-ordination, which is chaired by the United Nations Secretary General, I believe that we are moving towards a more concerted inter-agency effort among the agencies concerned with the disabled. These, as you know, are the United Nations Social Development Division; the World Health Organization; the International Labour Office especially in respect of Vocational Rehabilitation; UNESCO which deals with special education for the handicapped; UNICEF which works in the maternal, infant, and childhood areas; and the High Commission for Refugees which must care for handicapped refugees. At a special meeting of these agencies in 1975, a “New Concept” was agreed, incorporating a set of objectives, aims and basic principles. I believe these are important as the foundation for a strategy and, not least, for an approach t o the disabled in developing countries that can at least begin to overcome the terrible difficulty of scarce financial resources and the paramount importance of finding cost-beneficial arguments for development planners. Let me quote to you some of the key points in this New Concept: ‘‘ (a) the main objective of the programme should be to reduce the problems arising from disability for the disabled person himself, for his immediate surroundings, and for the community, utilizing all possible preventive and curative measures, or measures that might wholly or partly reverse an already present disability, or delay its progress. The action taken should not only be directed towards the individual but also towards factors in his surroundings or in the society at large;. (b) the programme should be directed towards vulnerable groups in the developing world with a high risk of disability and persons whose disability could be expected to be preventable or with whom a rehabilitative intervention was likely to be successful;