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The Link Between Poverty and Disability

A Multi-level approach to health is the understanding that multiple factors can produce a health outcome (Galea, 2015). This concept can be easily applied to the physical, mental, visual and audible disabled patient population. As many factors can affect this patient population with regards to their socioeconomic status, mental health, physical health, and quality of life. The multi-level model for this assignments focus, will be on how different factors can affect someone with a disability and their socioeconomic status.

Factors that can negatively impact an individual with a disability are:

- Social/Cultural Stigma

- Denial of opportunities

- Deficits in rights

- Decreased participation in decision making processes

(Disability and Development)

The link between poverty and disability are the absence or inaccessibility to healthcare due to high costs of medical devices or rehabilitation. Limited access to education/employment and social exclusion due to physical barriers (Disability and Development).

The multi-level model below is a cyclic model showing how these factors can negatively impact one’s socio-economic status and visually showing the link between disability and poverty.

(Disability and Development)

The model by (Disability and Development) only portrays the negative factors that can affect an individual with a disability with regards to their socioeconomic status. The multi-level model by Simplican et al. shows how ecological conditions can support or disable social inclusion for someone with a disability.

Simplican et.al 2015

Social Inclusion is a definition found in the literature and is defined as an interaction between interpersonal and community participation, which has been shown to improve quality of life. This model provided by Simplican et al. shows how the levels of the Individual, Interpersonal, Organisational, Community and Socio-Political interact with each other. To maintain social inclusion, the individual factors examined are based on overall happiness and self-esteem of the individual. The individual if greatly affected by their interpersonal relationships which are relationships between family, friends or staff of a group home (Simplican et al. 2015). Organisational qualities can either be family, employment settings or group homes. If there are negative outcomes from the organisation this can take away from the positive effects achieved from the individual or interpersonal level (Simplican et al. 2015). The organisational and community levels are also influenced by the socio-political level which are laws and legal enforcement. In Ontario specifically, there is the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disability Act (AOPA) that assist organizations to identify and remove barriers to improve accessibility in 5 areas of daily life (Accessibility Ontario).

- Customer Service Standard

- Information and Communication Standard

- Transportation Standard

- Employment Standard

- Design of Public Spaces Standard

(Accessibility Ontario)

Social inclusion provides a better quality of life and therefore allows someone with a disability to avoid the vicious cycle in the previous model. There are many other multi-level healthcare models that can be applied to this patient population which I am looking forward to focus on as this is the population I see on a daily basis.

References

About Accessibility Laws. (2015, June 3). Retrieved from https://www.ontario.ca/page/about-accessibility-laws

Accessibility Ontario. Retrieved from

Employment Supports: What is available. (2016, May 8.) Retrieved from

Galea, S.(2015, May 30). The Determination of Health Across the Life Course and Across Levels of Influence. Retrieved from.

Simplican, S.C., Leader, G., Kosciulek, J., Leahy, M. (2015). Defining social inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities: An ecological model of social networks and community participation. Research in Developmental Disabilities 38 (2015) 18–29. Retrieved from


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