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Equal Treatment Project Final Conference: Advancing Healthcare Inclusion & Equal Treatment for People with Intellectual Disabilities

EPR-led Equal Treatment Project has come to an end, but the work to ensure its resulting outcomes contribute to better healthcare for people with intellectual disabilities will continue past the project lifetime!

The final conference, held on 26 November in Brussels, was an opportunity to share the project’s accomplishments, and more importantly – to also hear back what was its impact on the involved doctors, healthcare experts and persons with intellectual disabilities.

The event kicked-off with keynote speakers Soufiane El Amrani (European Platform of Self Advocates (EPSA)) and Dikaios Sakellariou (World Health Organization Europe) setting the scene on the current status of and barriers to better healthcare for people with disabilities.


Panel Discussion: Inclusive Healthcare for All

Opening the session, Stelios Charitakis, ICF Researcher commissioned by DG SANTE, presented the Study on Guidance to Increase Access to Healthcare for People with Disabilities. The shared results were the basis for the panel discussion, during which Dr. Laura Vergés Planagumà, a psychyatrist at the Mental Health Service for People with Intellectual Disabilities in Institut d’Assistència Sanitària (Salt, Girona) and Freddy Jussien, Advocacy Lead of Inclusion Europe, highlighted the importance and benefits of having inclusive healthcare policies.

Transforming Healthcare Access: EQUAL TREATMENT Project Achievements

During the last two years, the ERASMUS+ funded Equal Treatment Project undertook desk and action research to fully inform the development of policy recommendations for increased access and equal treatment to secondary and tertiary healthcare services for people with intellectual disabilities. Project partners presented the policy recommendations, as well as the results from the project’s innovative training course for healthcare staff, designed to support the delivery of more inclusive and equitable care.

The Equal Treatment Policy Recommendations are:

  1. Clear guidelines or decision-making protocols to prevent discrimination and ensure equal access to care for PwID, informed by existing good practices shared through training and materials at local levels.
  2. Patients with intellectual disabilities should be flagged during the initial contact with secondary and tertiary healthcare services through a system of identification that allows to collect, codify and store data about people with intellectual disability in a hospital database.
  3. Reasonable adjustments should be implemented to remove barriers that may affect people with intellectual disability, adapting or changing the way services are delivered to meet an individual’s needs.
  4. Effective staff–patient communication is essential in the treatment of people with intellectual disability and to make sure that the patient is well-informed about the medical examinations that must be undertaken.
  5. Supported decision making to all types of care or treatment must be the rule.
  6. Health care professionals need to develop their skills and knowledge in order to better support the health literacy and communication needs of patients with intellectual disabilities. Developing and delivering training programmes.
  7. Training should be provided also to people with intellectual disabilities and their supporters. This would enable people with intellectual disabilities to better know how to access secondary and tertiary healthcare services, for example how to schedule an appointment and follow the most common hospital procedures.
  8. Promote the appointment of intellectual disability nurses or a “disability/inclusion champion” with a clear definition of their role.
  9. Promote a co-production approach in the design of healthcare services to people with intellectual disabilities that engage users, their families, professional supporters and service providers with expertise in developing the best framework including the above reasonable adjustments that to meet their individual needs.
  10. Service providers would benefit from the cooperation and involvement of stakeholders to ensure adequate funding is allocated to put the above recommendations in place. In these regards, consistent funding from the EU and national and regional level is needed to support emerging projects aiming at more inclusive secondary and tertiary healthcare practices to become part of the hospitals procedures and protocols at a later stage.


Bringing the conference full circle, participants also heard personal testimonials from people with intellectual disabilities, healthcare professionals and administrators on their experience with the Equal Treatment training course.

Watch the personal testimonials:

Access all speaker contributions here.