Disabled Citizens Research Articles

DESIGN OF A SMART BUILDING CONTROL WITH VIEW TO THE SENIOR CITIZENS' NEEDS

The population prognosis predicts a growing share of senior citizens in the demographic distribution of population in the Czech Republic. When designing intelligent buildings, it is necessary to map the citizens' needs in detail and find a suitable solution that responds to the detected needs of the occupants. The article describes approaches to the technical solution of a comfortable remote control of technical functions in an intelligent building with implemented wireless technology, respecting the technical, sociological and user needs of the senior, sick or disabled citizens.

Flexible Working and Employment of People with Disabilities at Customs Brokerage Firms in Turkey: A Social Responsibility Project

The ratio of the disabled population is higher in Turkish society than the world average. Previous studies on this topic have been limited to statistical surveys and no firm theoretical bases have been established in the investigation of the perception of disability in Turkish society. Approximately 8.5 million disabled citizens in Turkey -- about 12% of the overall population -- face many difficulties, the greatest of which is unemployment.The purpose of this study was to evaluate the employment of disabled people as tele-workers working from home for Turkish Customs brokerage companies. This project is a social responsibility project to enable participation in social life and provide a career for disabled people in Customs brokerage firms. This project was implemented by Uludag University in partnership with the Bursa Industrialists and Businessmen Association (BUSIAD).In this study, we will discuss how Customs brokerage firms can employ disabled people working at home using a tele-working system.

The Stimulus Effects of Employment Programs for Minnesota's Disabled Citizens: A Case Study of Merrick, Inc.

Keywords: human services; disabled adults; social dividends; economic benefitState budget negotiations around the country have focused on cuts to human services programs for people with disabilities. These include Long-Term Care (LTC) programs for disabled adults. Using an LTC day program in Vadnais Heights, Minnesota as a case study, this article provides an alternative perspective. It describes the social dividends of employment in LTC programs. These extend well beyond the services provided to clients. Other dividends include wages to program staff; avoided costs of residential supervision; taxes paid by clients and staff; state revenue from charitable gambling and grants supplementing state taxpayer dollars. Companies that employ people with disabilities through contracts with such programs do so because it makes good business sense. In sum, public investments in day service programs for people with developmental disabilities at this facility produce nearly $3.00 of economic benefit for every $1.00 spent. Apart from humanitarian concerns, government cuts to such programs are penny-wise and dollar-foolish.

Reducing Perceived Barriers to Nursing Homes Data Entry in the Advancing Excellence Campaign: The Role of LANEs (Local Area Networks for Excellence)

Advancing Excellence (AE) is a coalition-based campaign concerned with how society cares for its elderly and disabled citizens. The purpose of this project was to work with a small group of volunteer nursing homes and with local quality improvement networks called LANEs (Local Area Networks for Excellence) in 6 states in a learning collaborative. The purpose of the collaborative was to determine effective ways for LANEs to address and mitigate perceived barriers to nursing home data entry in the national Advancing Excellence campaign and to test methods by which local quality improvement networks could support nursing homes as they enter data on the AE Web site. A semistructured telephone survey of nursing homes was conducted in 6 states. Participants included LANEs from California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Washington. Facility characteristics were obtained from a series of questions during the telephone interview. Three states (GA, MA, OK) piloted a new spreadsheet and process for entering data on staff turnover, and 3 states (CA, MI, WA) piloted a new spreadsheet and process for entering data on consistent assignment. Many of the nursing homes we contacted had not entered data for organizational goals on the national Web site, but all were able to do so with telephone assistance from the LANE. Eighty-five percent of nursing homes said they would be able to collect information on advance directives if tools (eg, spreadsheets) were provided. Over 40% of nursing homes, including for-profit homes, were willing to have staff and residents/families enter satisfaction data directly on an independent Web site. Nursing homes were able to convey concerns and questions about the process of goal entry, and offer suggestions to the LANEs during semistructured telephone interviews. The 6 LANEs discussed nursing home responses on their regularly scheduled calls, and useful strategies were shared across states. Nursing homes reported that they are using Advancing Excellence target setting and goal entry to improve care, and that they would use new tools such as those for measuring satisfaction, consistent assignment, and advance directives. Having LANE members contact nursing homes directly by telephone engaged the nursing homes in providing valuable feedback on new Advancing Excellence goals and data entry. It also provided an opportunity to clarify issues related to the campaign and ongoing quality improvement efforts, including culture change.

How Far Towards Equality' A Vulnerabilities Approach to the Rights of Disabled People

This paper will explore the application of Fineman's vulnerability thesis in the context of the barriers to participation experienced by disabled people. It will address three central issues: 1. The role of the State in promoting the substantive equality of disabled citizens 2. The potential of the vulnerability thesis in bridging the gap between positive and negative rights 3. A holistic approach to disability discrimination based on vulnerability theory In particular, this paper will focus on the multi-faceted nature of discrimination and analyse Fineman's guidance on how the State might redress this through investigating the systemic reasons for disadvantage and exclusion. It will also consider the effectiveness of providing legal remedies based on the vulnerabilities of individuals (assessed through environmental, social and cultural factors) rather than based on membership of a particular minority group.

LTC Community Wants Inclusion in Reform

LTC Community Wants Inclusion in Reform

Enhancing Accessibility to E-Government Processes

Many governmental institutions provide their customers with access to documents by electronic means. It is worthwhile to look at both the chances and the risks which this process implies for disabled citizens. Due to legal constraints governmental authorities are particularly responsible to consider the needs of handicapped persons. Our contribution follows the observation that governmental processes mostly are based on forms. We distinguish several processing scenarios, with the use of paper as means of transport on the one end and complete electronic treatment at the other end. This article focuses on approaches that provide access to governmental processes for people with visual impairments. Additionally, we aim to enable electronic government processes in developing countries where citizens have limited experience in handling IT-based processes. We describe an approach to associate synthesized speech to scanned images of printed documents, thus yielding an audio-visual document representation.

Operations Research Improves Quality and Efficiency in Home Care

Elder care systems are facing increased costs, primarily because the elderly constitute a growing percentage of the population. Sweden publicly finances such systems; in 2005, the cost to taxpayers on a national level was 8.8 billion euros ($13 billion). The many customized aspects of scheduling home care workers to assist elderly and disabled citizens with their varying needs contribute to these costs. Laps Care, a system that was developed in 2002, uses operations research modeling to eliminate the manual planning of home care unit assignments. More than 200 units/organizations in Swedish municipalities use Laps Care each day to plan staff scheduling and routing for 4,000 home care workers. The system has increased operational efficiency by 10–15 percent; this corresponds to an annual savings of 20–30 million euros ($30–$45 million). In addition, the quality of home care for elderly citizens has improved. The City of Stockholm, with its 800,000 inhabitants, adopted Laps Care in 2006 and started a full implementation and rollout during 2008, thus adding 800 units and 15,000 home care workers to the system. The savings for the City of Stockholm will be 20–30 million euros ($30–$45 million).

On other people’s terms: schools’ encounters with disabled students

According to Swedish legislation as well as laws pertaining to disabled citizens, Swedish schools are to be accessible for all children and adolescents. This implies that disabilities of any type must not be allowed to prevent students from completing their schooling on their own terms. The purpose of this research was to study the degree to which the Swedish school is accessible for all students. A total 200 professionals and politicians were interviewed alongside more than 30 upper secondary school students. The results show that the ambition level is high with regard to adapting educational programmes for the disabled student group, especially in the rhetoric of politicians and civil servants. However, in practice, teachers and head teachers have considerably more difficulty in delivering to students satisfactory schooling. This is often due to conflict between the striving for inclusion and the difficulty adapting learning environments during everyday classroom instruction. By use of institutional theory the study demonstrates that intentions as described of responsible politicians are altered in the system when confronted with the institutional reality. Schools’ meeting the natural variation of difference in the student group causes complications in educational work in which various solutions are attempted. When educational differentiation is found wanting in attempts to meet students’ various needs, various types of special solutions are sought, which have the objective of reducing heterogeneity among the students. This type of organisational differentiation seems accepted and legitimised where it concerns students having various kinds of school‐related difficulties, while seeming to create a disadvantage for some other students. One should understand this as thought coercion, where pressure from professionals in schools leaves little room for other strategies and in which the concept of the inclusive school is challenged.

Global trends in disability rehabilitation and their implications for leprosy programmes

Excerpt] Globally, the disability rehabilitation scenario today is at an exciting stage. After many years of effort, the International Convention on Rights of Persons with Disability is in sight, a major step forward, and binding on governments to protect the rights of their disabled citizens. At the regional level, the Asian and Pacific Decade of Disabled Persons (1993–2002) is extended from 2003 to 2012, and the Biwako Millenium Framework promoted by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) is being followed in the Asian region for programmes for people with disability. The period 2000–2009 was formally proclaimed the African Decade of Disabled Persons in June 2002. The African Decade seeks to replicate the practices of the Asian and Pacific Decade. The Arab Decade of Disabled People was launched in 2004. The Decade of Disabled Persons in the Americas was launched in 2006. All these international statements focus on rights and inclusion of people with disabilities. To gain a better understanding of the current scenario and their implications for leprosy rehabilitation programmes, a brief summary of the Biwako Millenium Framework of the Asian and Pacific Decade1 is given below.

A Rawlsian Perspective on Justice for the Disabled

I aim to identify and describe some basic elements of a Rawlsian approach that may help us to think conscientiously about how, from the standpoint of justice, we should treat the disabled. Rawls has been criticized for largely ignoring issues of this sort. These criticisms lose their appeal, I suggest, when we distinguish between a Rawlsian standpoint and the limited project Rawls mainly undertakes in A Theory of Justice. There his explicit aim is to find principles of justice, which are to govern the basic structures of a closed, well-ordered society that exists under reasonably favorable conditions, that would be chosen by parties in the original position from among a small set of traditional conceptions of justice. Once we develop a conception of justice for a society like that, Rawlsians hope we can make certain revisions to find principles of justice for a society like ours. Finally, I sketch what seems to me a plausible way for a Rawlsian to begin thinking about how a society like ours should provide justice for its disabled citizens.

Habermas, Rights, and the Learning Disabled Citizen

For at least the last three decades or so the hegemony of scientific knowledge and technological expertise has been subject to sustained critique in the domains of health and social services. Expert sources of policy legitimation are increasingly challenged by more thoroughly democratic and consensus-based orientations to the legitimation of public programmes. This phenomenon is not confined to practical politics but is increasingly evident in the domain of political theory as well. While this trend in political theory is laudable in many respects, it introduces quite serious and troubling theoretical questions regarding the rights of citizens with learning disabilities who may be intellectually ill-equipped to participate in the deliberative public sphere. In this essay, I critically assess the work of Jurgen Habermas, one of the world's most sophisticated proponents of deliberative democracy, in order to highlight the theoretical problems learning disability poses for his political theory. I conclude with a brief sketch of what empirical research might contribute to a more satisfying approach to understanding the rights of learning disabled citizens.

Medicare: a policy primer

For some, Medicare is a model of what national health insurance could be in the United States. Despite its low administrative costs and significant contributions to the well-being of America?s oldest and most disabled citizens, some critics assail the program as being out of sync with the needs of many senior citizens, while others often refer to it as ?unsustainable? because of its high costs. Physicians and hospital administrators endlessly criticize and debate Medicare, but rely upon it for a substantial share of their revenues. In Medicare: A Policy Primer, Marilyn Moon explains what Medicare is, how it works, and where is it headed. She examines the problems facing the program and which reform options hold the most promise. She also examines the history of Medicare and how the program works in the broader context of health care, the federal government, and the economy. It is a clear introduction to one of the most critical debates in health policy and an important volume for anyone interested in the future of Medicare.

Experiences of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees in Houston Shelters: Implications for Future Planning

To shed light on how the public health community can promote the recovery of Hurricane Katrina victims and protect people in future disasters, we examined the experiences of evacuees housed in Houston area shelters 2 weeks after the hurricane. A survey was conducted September 10 through 12, 2005, with 680 randomly selected respondents who were evacuated to Houston from the Gulf Coast as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Interviews were conducted in Red Cross shelters in the greater Houston area. Many evacuees suffered physical and emotional stress during the storm and its aftermath, including going without adequate food and water. In comparison with New Orleans and Louisiana residents overall, disproportionate numbers of this group were African American, had low incomes, and had no health insurance coverage. Many had chronic health conditions and relied heavily on the New Orleans public hospital system, which was destroyed in the storm. Our results highlight the need for better plans for emergency communication and evacuation of low-income and disabled citizens in future disasters and shed light on choices facing policymakers in planning for the long-term health care needs of vulnerable populations.

Where ethics and politics meet

I examine the role of humanitarianism and compassion in an emergent ethical configuration that makes illness a primary means by which undocumented immigrants obtain legal residency (“papers”) in France. I argue that the sacred place of biological integrity in this ethical discourse leads immigrants to trade in biological integrity for political recognition. I demonstrate first how humanitarianism has been transformed into a form of politics, functioning as a transnational system of governance tied to capital and labor even while purporting to be apolitical. I focus in the second half of the article on the consequences of humanitarianism as politics, which include new biopolitical practices, unexpected diseased and disabled citizens, and a limited version of what it means to be human.

Constructing Policy Networks: Social Assistance Reform in the Czech Republic

Czech social insurance and family transfers experienced fundamental reform in 1995 but Czech social assistance benefits still lack comprehensive change. This article explains the delay in Czech social assistance reform by appling policy network studies in a postcommunist context. Although few organizations perticipate in the Czech social assistance policy network, they are divided: they lack the common interests and exchangable resources necessary to create dialogue and compromise. The organizations of disabled citizens are the only interest group active in the policy network, with the operators of state social care institutions their primary opponents. In the late 1990s, this already fragmented issue network suffered further division when the EU entered as a powerful network actor with another set of policy goals. Until the policy network structure facilitates more dialogue and consensus‐building, hopes for comprehensive social assistance reform will linger unfulfilled.

Frail and Disabled Users of Home Care: Confident Consumers or Disentitled Citizens?

ABSTRACTHealth care cuts and restructuring are shifting the site of acute care from hospitals to homes and prompting provincial governments to introduce varying forms of mixed economies in home care. Typically, such arrangements seek to drive down public costs and to reposition service users as “consumers” of market-modelled care. Drawing on an ongoing study of frail elderly women and women with disabilities receiving home care in Ontario, this paper explores the significance for service users of these economic and political objectives. Rather than feeling like consumers free to exercise choice and demand quality in the mixed economy of home care, they experienced their positioning within it as insecure and subordinate and its supply as unpredictable and meagre. The implications of these findings for fashioning secure and equitable public responses to elderly and disabled citizens who need assistance at home over the long term are discussed.

Medicare Prescription Coverage and Congressional Gridlock: Time for Compromise

Medicare Prescription Coverage and Congressional Gridlock: Time for Compromise

One World: the Disabled in Society

Did you know that last December 5 was the Day of the Disabled. No? I’m not surprised. Possibly more people have heard that 1999 is the Year of the Elderly. A large proportion of our population is now over 60, and, frequently with old age comes some degree of disability, so perhaps our disabled citizens will get their share of attention this year. After all, the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1955 (Part III) which requires service providers to review their procedures to make sure they do not exclude disabled people, comes into full force in October of this year. Then there is the new Human Rights Bill several of whose clauses cover the disabled, and the setting up by the government of a Disability Rights Commission which will mean that in future those suffering discrimination will have a body to whom they can bring complaints instead of being faced with the need to bring a private prosecution.So all that remains is to change the attitude to disability in the general community. How do we do this?First, (this sounds like a Delia Smith recipe) we must bury the Great Disability Debate as to whether it is personal physical limitations which constrict the lives of disabled people (the physical model) or the fact that society is not prepared to adapt itself to encompass the disabled (the social model). The basis for the first of these two approaches is that the disabled must accept that their life-situation is going to be different to that of the able-bodied ; for the second, that the disabled have a right to equal access and opportunities however difficult the circumstances.

The European Community and Disability Discrimination: Time to address the deficit of powers?

Disabled citizens are overlooked and ignored in the Treaty on European Union and as a result the European Community has limited competences to address disability related issues, and specifically disability discrimination. This article argues that this situation needs to be remedied at the present Inter Governmental Conference, which is being held to review the Treaty. There are sound justifications, based on political, economic and social grounds, for extending the competences of the Community in this way. Disability discrimination results in many disabled citizens being unable to fully exercise the rights conferred on them by Community law, such as the right to free movement and the right to vote: furthermore, European economies are suffering as disability discrimination artificially restricts the contribution which disabled citizens could make as both consumers and workers; and, lastly disability discrimination is leading to poverty and social exclusion throughout the European Union today.