Disability versus handicap - 8 Sep 2008

This week the Operational Hospital Management Conference runs in Johannesburg from the 9 to 11th. The Operational Hospital Management Conference has emerged as the leading conference in South Africa aimed at improving performance and the quality of services at public hospitals. The conference offers a tangible learning and sharing opportunity for all management levels within our public hospitals and Healthcare Sector.

The Operational Hospital Management Conference aims at assisting healthcare management with practical solutions to meet the ever-increasing demands being placed on services, clinical and hospital resources.

Should be well worth a visit.

On a different note, it's ironic that as Natalie du Toit wins gold for South Africa in the para-olympic games in Beijing, people disabled by landmines in Uganda are struggling to reintegrate into society.

This highlights the stigma that still attaches to those who are disabled in our society. I have two close friends who are in wheelchairs - they both became disabled young, so have a long life of potential difficulty ahead of them. Something as simple as going out to a restaurant with them brings home just how difficult daily life is for someone who is 'differently abled'.

Society can handicap such people - generally through ignorance rather than malice. But that ignorance leads to serious problems, such as a person in a wheelchair not being able to access a public building because no-one thought to provide ramps of a suitable gradient. Or the toilet that is provided for the 'disabled' fails to meet the requirements, causing great inconvenience and sometimes embarrassment.

In Uganda the problem is stigma - again caused by ignorance. We would like to think that we are a more sophisticated society, but prejudice is seldom far from the surface and can only be combatted effectively by awareness and knowledge.