On 24-25 November 2024, I attended the European Day of Persons with Disabilities conference organised by the European Disability Forum in Brussels (Belgium), alongside European Working Group of People with Dementia Co-Chairperson Lieselotte Klotz and colleagues from Alzheimer Europe . There were over 450 delegates from all over Europe. It was a good two days and the highlight of the event was the Accessibility Award. This award is a wonderful thing and goes to different countries every year, but there was a general feeling of a little bit of frustration among many of the delegates, as there seem to be a lot of promises made each year and not so much delivered. Our hope is that the next five years of the new European Parliament can only bring better and bigger changes.
At the conference, I pointed out that, while great emphasis is put on people who have wheelchairs or who are visually impaired or indeed anyone that has a visible disability, people with invisible disabilities and their families, including people affected by dementia and their families, are not really included and are very badly affected by this. There are approximately eight million people who have dementia across Europe and that’s not including their families, so whilst it is a wonderful thing having public transport made accessible, if the staff who are driving trains or buses, or those working at the stations are not trained to cater for people with invisible as well as visible disabilities, then we have a lot of work to do.
It was also pointed out that people with invisible disabilities, especially people with dementia, need to be included in the panel discussions and that more needs to be done, because people who have invisible disabilities tend to suffer more from social isolation, especially those who live in rural areas. There was also a very strong feeling among delegates that the European Health portfolio should be a portfolio in its own right, as the portfolio currently covers Health and Animal Welfare. An argument can be made that this is because people may contract different things from animals, but surely there is such a major problem with health on its own, all over Europe, that it’s a portfolio that needs to stand alone. Overall, I believe that whilst the European Day of Persons with Disabilities event was really interesting and it was great to be involved, the voice of people with invisible disabilities needs to be louder, needs to be heard and needs to be listened to!