UK Stroke Forum 2025 | Resources to address disability discrimination among healthcare professionals
Andy Tyerman, Clinical Psychologist, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, Aylesbury, UK, discusses the need for detailed training on disability discrimination among healthcare professionals. He mentions a website (https://equitynotjustequality.co.uk/) that has been set up to address these issues. This interview took place at the UK Stroke Forum (UKSF) 2025 Conference in Aberdeen, UK.
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Transcript
So my experience is working in brain injury rehabilitation, particularly community brain injury rehabilitation and vocational rehabilitation, and within that context, we would have worked with many of our clients who experienced discrimination, particularly because we had a programme to help them to return to work, so issues of disability discrimination in the workplace used to come up quite often...
So my experience is working in brain injury rehabilitation, particularly community brain injury rehabilitation and vocational rehabilitation, and within that context, we would have worked with many of our clients who experienced discrimination, particularly because we had a programme to help them to return to work, so issues of disability discrimination in the workplace used to come up quite often. Now, we as a team were there to support our clients and I think we managed that, not always easily, but we were able to manage that. About 10 years ago, I started to get reports of disability discrimination within my own profession of clinical psychology, in training and in practice, and that is more difficult because those people do not have access to a service to support them. So that led me to actually learn about and find out about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that I hadn’t previously heard of, and to study in detail the disability requirements of the Equality Act. That was really helpful because it was eye-opening, because it’s extremely detailed and comprehensive, and it was really helpful to us in our own service in thinking about how we could make our service more accessible for people with disabilities in general. However, what those examples led me to realise, not only did I not know, but the majority of health professionals aren’t given detailed training about this. And having raised issues within my own profession, within the NHS, I struggled to get engagement, so I decided to try and do something about it myself and set up a website, develop resources, including a Disability Discrimination Awareness Questionnaire and five practice checklists, trying to help health professionals to understand about discrimination, to avoid inadvertent discrimination and to enhance their practice.
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