The National Commission, Persons with Disability is working to stop the placing of people with disabilities in institutes altogether, and find solutions to better integrate them in the community, according to the commission’s chairman, Joseph Camilleri.
This year, the commission will be conducting research to identify and quantify costs associated with supporting people with disability in households.
“While there are people who will need four or five people 24/7 supporting them, people such as myself will only need someone to help them for a few minutes daily,” Mr Camilleri told timesofmalta.com.
“We shouldn’t think that all disabilities need the full complement of facilities.”
Currently, people with disabilities who are supported by their parents are left in limbo when their parents die, “and all the independence they would have worked for through the years falls through” Mr Camilleri said. Even though there werehomes in the community such as Dar Pirotta, Dar Nazareth and Dar il-Wens, these are full as people were living longer.
“What we want (in the long term) is the government to stop institutionalisation as an option altogether,” Mr Camilleri said, adding that instead, they would be proposing that the government introduce some form of subsidised housing and services to enable this.
Asked whether this could be considered discriminatory, Mr Camilleri said this would only be giving people with disability a level ground to start on.
He said that very often, what under normal circumstances would be considered as support, such as someone else cooking, doing the laundry or giving a lift, were considered “care” when they were done for someone with a disability.
During a conference on World Disability Day held this morning at the Phoenicia Hotel, people with a disability and those around them started giving feedback to the commission.
Tonio Mercieca, who 33 years ago had a spinal injury, said that when one spoke on support for disabled people , “we’re saying that we always depend on the family to take care of the person – it’s as if the state should only go in when parents go missing. The state should be involved from Day One.
“Services have improved a lot – but what is the situation now? If a person, like me, who is financially independent, a taxpayer, in short, a normal consumer, but who needs support for me to get to work, loses their support net, the only solutions are either residential support or me ending up at St Vincent de Paule, where you end up losing all you had worked for over the years,” Mr Mercieca said.
He suggested that people with disabilities could pool in, live together and be given state support where needed.