For many children and young people, particularly those with learning difficulties, attending a theatre performance can be a confusing and stressful experience. Sara Ryan from the University of Warwick has described the experience of many parents taking their children into such public places as being “contingent, unsatisfactory and incomplete”.
Category Archives: disability
The scandal of common mental illnesses left untreated
Would we tolerate a situation in which the majority of those suffering from diabetes, heart disease, or arthritis were left to fend for themselves, or asked to make do with inferior therapies?
Imagine you are the campaigns manager of a political party. You are aware of a public health crisis that, at any one time, affects a third of the population, reduces life expectancy as drastically as smoking, is more disabling than angina, asthma, or diabetes, and reduces GDP by around 4% each year. You know this crisis can be substantially – and cheaply – alleviated. Wouldn’t you make the issue a central theme in your election campaign?
Accessibility should be part of everyday arts practice
The English National Ballet’s My First Coppélia makes use of symbol resources, which supports the inclusion of people with a communication difficulties. Photograph: ENB
A £10 charge to visit a GP would be just the start of a slippery slope for the NHS
We either let our NHS be trashed by the privatisers and cutters, or we defend a properly funded, publicly run, universal system that is free at the point of use
A GP with a patient. ‘This ideological assault is being accompanied by an actual attempt to dismantle and privatise the NHS.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
A slow hand clap for Andy McGovern, a London hospital nurse who has proposed that the Royal College of Nursing supports a £10 charge to visit a GP. On its own terms, the proposal is an unacceptable assault on the very foundations of the NHS: that it is free at the point of use. But the suggestion is so menacing because of where it originates from. The many enemies of the NHS – who have to be diplomatic, knowing that the NHS “is the closest the English have to a religion”, as Nigel Lawson once put it – will rejoice. “Aha!” they will think. “Now even the nurses are debating NHS charges, we have been given the political cover we need!”
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