Review

What’s gone wrong with health care? Alison Hill (ed) King’s Fund, 2001. £14.99

DISABLED PEOPLE AND EMPLOYMENT
Sally French
Ashgate Publishing , 2001, £39.95

French’s work ‘aims to investigate employment from the direct experiences and perspectives of disabled people themselves’ – a perspective too often ignored. Although adopting a social model approach, this work focuses entirely on visually impaired physiotherapists and concentrates heavily on a specific range of barriers to employment. But the principles still apply –people with disabilities encounter barriers, which mostly result from negative attitudes and misguided assumptions.

After a broad introduction to models of disability, and how disability affects employment, French brings in the issue of attitudes of health and welfare professionals, and how they can influence the careers of disabled people, both as clients and colleagues.

A fascinating history follows, of how people with visual impairments came to be trained and accepted – in some places – as physiotherapists. Explained as a ‘historical accident’ inasmuch as physiotherapy originates from massage, which visually impaired people traditionally practised, it leads us to the present day, the closure of the North London school of physiotherapy for the visually handicapped, and the impact of ‘equal opportunities’ on the profession.

French then looks at barriers encountered by visually impaired physiotherapists – in education, employment and on a personal level. She identifies four major coping strategies highlighted by VIPs: ‘openness and assertion; minimisation of disability; compensation; and avoidance of difficulties’. It is significant that these strategies become easier to use with seniority.

Significantly, although all the participants were visually impaired physiotherapists, the nature and perception of the barriers they encountered varied widely, as did their choices of which of them to tackle and how.

However, although visually impaired physiotherapists have been a part of the profession for over 100 years, they have been ‘assimilated’ (allowed to enter it as it stands) but have not been ‘included’. This, of course, would entail altering the environment and working practices to enable them to work in a non-disabling workplace, an approach still too far removed from reality.