01 November 2006

Health and Wellness: The Surgeon General’s Call to Action

Lee Jones, who has Down syndrome, leads an exercise class for disabled people at a community center. (© AP Images)

In 2005, on the 15th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona announced a Call to Action to Improve the Health and Wellness of Persons with Disabilities. The surgeon general said, “The call to action is a call to caring ... The reality is that for too long we provided lesser care to people with disabilities ... We must redouble our efforts so that people with disabilities achieve full access to disease prevention and health promotion services.”

Disability has been defined as characteristics of the body, mind, or senses that, to a greater or lesser extent, affect a person’s ability to engage independently in some or all aspects of day-to-day life. Understanding that disability is neither inability nor sickness becomes even more important when it is pointed out that almost everyone will have at some point in life at least one disability. The incidence of disability increases with age. By age 80, almost 75 percent of people have a disability.

Developed in collaboration with the Office on Disability of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Call to Action identifies four goals to help people with disabilities experience full, rewarding, and healthy lives as contributing members of their communities:

• Increase understanding nationwide that people with disabilities can lead long, healthy, and productive lives.

• Increase knowledge among health care professionals and provide them with tools to screen, diagnose, and treat with dignity the whole person with a disability.

• Increase awareness among people with disabilities of the steps they can take to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

• Increase accessible health care and support services to promote independence for people with disabilities.

According to Margaret J. Giannini, director of the HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) Office on Disability and a physician with more than 50 years of experience working in the field of disability, it is important to begin to focus on the abilities of people with disabilities. They “can learn, get married, have a family, worship, vote, work, and live long, productive lives. We need to make sure we treat them as active members of our society.”

Since the Call to Action was issued in 2005, a number of steps designed to achieve these goals have been identified through an inclusive planning process involving diverse working groups, and these steps are being implemented. For instance, for the first goal, to increase nationwide understanding, one action was the creation of the People’s Piece, a publication written at a sixth-grade reading level that explains and illustrates the key messages of the Call to Action, such as the idea that eliminating barriers to accessible treatment can prevent secondary or complicating problems from arising. A second set of actions involves working with health care professionals, including training facilities and medical schools, to help new professionals become aware at the earliest point in their careers of the issues and treatments related to disability. The People’s Piece and other information can be found at http://www.hhs.gov/od and www.hhs.gov/od/programs. The Web site http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/disabilities/ contains links to speeches, press releases, and fact sheets, including some with statistics related to this program.

As U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said upon announcing the program, “This Call to Action is a reminder that people with disabilities are important members of our society, and that including them in all aspects of American life is not only required by our nation’s laws, but also by our nation’s conscience.”