Barrier Free Initiative
Everyone that is disabled runs into situations where we cannot find a place to park or because of stairs, broken elevator, extra doors or other impediment cannot access a business or public building. Most large companies are getting better about making it easy for the disabled to get into the store by removing all stairs and installing automatically opening doors. However, there are many small malls that put disabled parking at one extreme end of the building or make all entrances with a heavy pull-out door and small step in the entrance. So those of us in wheelchairs get to pull ourselves all the way to the store to find out that there is no way we are going to get in. When asking the business owner for help, some say “why bother, we never get any disabled people shopping here”. Gee we wonder why. If the disabled cannot get into the store, how many do you expect to shop there? To help problems like this, The Barrier Free Healthcare Initiative has been started. Based in Boston, it is an effort to make it easy for the disabled to access medical care without requiring an army of people to pull us through tiny doorways, tall chairs or MRI’s that are too high to transfer to.
This is an awesome idea that we all need to push in our own communities. As a tetraplegic (only 1 good arm) I find it very difficult to find an MRI or Cat scan that can drop down to wheelchair level or has personnel trained to transfer the disabled. Some have personnel, but they refuse to help and management merely stands there and stares at you. It is obvious that there needs to be standards for hospitals and equipment owners like standalone MRI units so the disabled are given the same access as the able bodied. It would be nice if the medical community could get their collective act together and create something that they would all follow. Unfortunately, self policing is not the strong point of the medical institutions in the U.S., which points us to laws enacted at either the state or federal level.
State level laws could solve some of the worst problems but there are very different problems and concerns in each state that would need to be addressed. Unfortunately it would mean that the laws would be a mish-mash of things that would be enacted based on local hospitals and insurance companies. States with large insurance companies are going to reduce and control the help the disabled would get. Large hospitals would fight this because of cost and perceived burden in having to deal with additional disabled people. This situation would not be fair to the disabled in states with strong hospitals and insurance companies as they would not get the same level of help as other states.
Federal laws tend to take longer to pass but force all states to follow the same standards. Powerful local hospitals and insurance companies tend not to have the same level of power at the federal level that they show at the local state level. This would also let the national disability groups have their say on what challenges the disabled deal with at hospitals so we get actual disabled people helping to make decisions. The law created here would be more generic than the state level but it guarantees that we would not have a patchwork of laws that would be difficult to enforce and even harder to deal with if the disabled travel.
Regardless of which way we go, this is an excellent start to help those that spend a great deal of time in the hospital as compared to the able bodied. Lets hope that more disability groups take this as an opportunity to help everyone so that we have hospitals and other buildings that are easy to access and have equipment that have the same ease of use. It does not take much additional effort to make everything disability accessible, but it is usually very expensive to rip out what you already have and start over again.
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