Tag Archives: disability
Disabled activists planning a new wave of protests 30th September
New wave of protests to target ‘fitness to work’ company
Disabled activists are planning a new wave of protests aimed at the company paid to carry out controversial “fitness to work” tests on behalf of the government.Atos Healthcare has been targeted repeatedly by campaigners over the accuracy of its assessments, the way it treats disabled benefits claimants, and the generosity of its contract with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
The protests will take place across the UK on 30 September – many of them led by disabled people – with the most prominent likely to be outside a recruitment fair being run by the BMJ [formerly the British Medical Journal] in Islington, north London.
Concessionary coach fares are coming to an end
31 August 2011 Last updated at 11:46
Bus cuts ‘threat to vulnerable’
Coach firms have had enough time to prepare for cuts to long-distance concessionary fares, Transport Minister Norman Baker has said.
Such fares for those over 60, and for those with disabilities, are to be scrapped in England on 1 November.
Coach operators said they could have offered the government the savings they wanted without penalising people who depended on the long-distance services.
But Mr Baker said companies had been given 12 months’ notice of the plans.
Birmingham hospital error paralysed Newport teenager
From being an outgoing teenager her life has altered overnight
31 August 2011 Last updated at 06:31
A teenager was left paralysed from the waist down after a spinal anaesthetic was wrongly left in place for too long, a hospital has admitted.
Sophie Tyler, 14, of Risca, near Newport, had gallstone surgery in Birmingham Children’s Hospital in 2008.
But a pain-killing epidural infusion was not removed for two days, permanently damaging her spinal cord.
