Health

People with disabilities have a right to quality and inclusive healthcare, but they are often neglected within health programmes, systems and policies.

As a result, people with disabilities experience significant health inequalities and worse health outcomes than their peers, including:

• Up to a 20-year gap in life expectancy compared to people without disabilities
• A higher incidence of communicable and noncommunicable diseases, and more barriers accessing basic services
• Exclusion from social protection mechanisms and health insurance schemes

For women and girls with disabilities, these barriers are often compounded by gender discrimination. For example, they are less likely to be registered at birth, seek antenatal care and have a skilled attendant when giving birth; and more likely to experience adverse birth outcomes and require postpartum emergency care.

Sightsavers works in partnership with ministries of health, mainstream health agencies, organisations of people with disabilities, the World Health Organization and other partners to promote health equity for people with disabilities.

Through our programmatic, research and influencing work at country, regional and global levels, we work to strengthen health systems, making them more inclusive and accessible for everyone.

What we’re doing to improve healthcare

• We meaningfully engage with people with disabilities and their representative organisations to ensure health programmes and systems meet their needs
• We design inclusive health promotion campaigns and reduce disability stigma in communities, so people with disabilities can make free and informed choices
• We help to train health workers and improve health services so they can provide quality and inclusive care for people with disabilities
• We make sure people with disabilities can access their right to quality healthcare through our tested twin-track approach to disability health equity
• We rigorously evaluate our programmes and carry out world-class research to demonstrate what works (and what doesn’t) in making healthcare inclusive
• We influence and support governments and decision-makers to develop, resource and implement disability-inclusive health policies and strategies