I have been thinking lately about how vulnerable we all are to disability and illness. It touches most of us eventually as we get older and need care; we can become ill or be involved in an accident, and there are no exceptions. We don’t seem to think about it until it happens to us.
Most of us carry genetic conditions we can’t do anything about and discover them once a member of our family has been diagnosed. One year we can be successful and living the life, then the following year we develop a serious illness or become terminally ill. We can be perfectly fine one day, and then we have an accident, and we are permanently affected by it. We never recover to the person we once were.
It is difficult to think about this, but it is a reality. Having a government support system in place, with a duty of care and good health services, is essential to help with disabilities, for support as we age, when we become ill or have an accident. We all benefit.
Disability is not something that happens only to someone else. As the World Health Organisation explains, ‘almost everyone will temporarily or permanently experience disability at some point in their life’.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Further Reading:
https://www.gimjournal.org/article/S1098-3600%2821%2904131-9/fulltext
https://www.who.int/europe/health-topics/disability#tab=tab_1
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ageing-and-health
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