About the report
A Window on Disability shows how disabled people interact with and experience the health system in New Zealand.
The report was developed in a partnership between the Commission, researchers from the Donald Beasley Institute, and data analytics group Nicholson Consulting. It combines disabled-led research and disability community engagement with advanced Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) data analytics.
This approach provides new evidence that reflects what many disabled people and their whānau have long reported about their experiences of health care.
Note that a summary of A Window on Disability will be presented in alternative formats including easy read, braille, New Zealand Sign Language, audio and large print. These will be published below when they are available.
Key findings
The report identified strong inequities between disabled and non-disabled people in access to and quality of healthcare along the entire life course, most of which occur in working-age adulthood. Key findings include:
- Disabled people experience poorer access to and quality of healthcare at every stage of life. Disabled people die from treatable conditions at five times the rate of non-disabled people.
- Māori disabled people die from treatable conditions at nearly 10 times the rate of non-Māori, non-Pacific non-disabled people.
- Inequities are compounded for people with more than one disability and for Māori or Pacific and disabled people.
- Disability is largely invisible in health data because most major health data sets in New Zealand do not record whether someone is disabled.
What the data tells us
Much of the data in this report is newly generated from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) research database and has not been analysed before. The data supports what many disabled people have described about their health outcomes and health care.
“It paints a stark picture of how health outcomes and service experiences change, and often worsen, over a disabled person’s life course.” Professor Sunny Collings.
Recommendations
The report makes four recommendations to improve equity and outcomes for disabled people.
- Accurately reflect disability in national health data. A good first step would be to commit to, and fully resource, the mandatory inclusion of standardised disability identification questions across all existing and future health data collection processes.
- Embed disability knowledge into all stages of the education, training and professional development of our healthcare workforce. A good first step would be to mandate a high-level working group to embed disability inclusive competencies across all health workforce curricula.
- Employ disabled people and tāngata whaikaha in health agencies and services. A good first step would be to conduct a comprehensive review of existing hiring frameworks to identify and extend, and if necessary, develop robust inclusivity and accessibility policies.
- Involve disabled people in decision making. A good first step would be to implement nationwide supported decision-making frameworks and training, developed in partnership with disabled people and tailored specifically for frontline health services.
Attachments
