Accessible health facilities minimise physical barriers, promote inclusivity and equity, and increase the utilisation of healthcare services by people with disabilities. They are critical to improving the health and quality of life of people with disabilities.
On this page you will find tools and resources to support stakeholders wanting to make health facilities disability inclusive.
JUMP TO TOOL:
FACILITY LEVEL ASSESSMENT | STARTER KIT FOR INCLUSIVE DESIGN
Measuring and improving the accessibility of health facilities was one of the main recommendations of the second Missing Billion Report. We have developed a new tool and accompanying menu of interventions to help Ministries of Health and individual health facilities measure, understand, and improve their accessibility. The Facility Level Assessment (FLA) adapts the Disability Awareness Checklist developed by the South African Medical Research Council to include refined components and indicators, specific measurements, scoring, and a menu of interventions to measure and improve the accessibility of health facilities.
The FLA covers six thematic areas across the patient journey:
Communication before arriving at a facility
Entrance to services
Reception, corridors, and rooms
Reasonable accommodation, communication and assistance
Health worker training
Receiving treatment and follow-up care
The FLA tool and menu of interventions are designed to be easy to use by non-experts, such as health facility leaders or staff. The process begins with a pre-assessment of key stakeholders (including people with disabilities and OPDs) and kick-off events to mobilize support for the assessment. We estimate that the assessment itself takes about 1 week to complete, including coordinating the facility visit and collecting the relevant data points (i.e., measuring doorways, checking tactile pavement etc.). Afterwards, individuals should plan for 2-3 months to review their reports, plan and implement interventions, and monitor the progress and impact of the interventions. You can download a high-level overview of the FLA tool below.
The Missing Billion Initiative is keen to support facilities, organisations, and Ministries that want to measure and improve the accessibility of their health facility. If you are interested in applying the Facility Level Assessment, please reach out to us at info@themissingbillion.org.
We will provide you with the requisite tools and support, including: the detailed framework and scoring; support on applying the FLA; guidance on compiling and communicating the results. Any results from use of the Missing Billion Facility Level Assessment should be coordinated and shared with the Missing Billion Initiative, so we may compile results and draw learnings from assessments of healthcare facilities globally.
If you are curious what the results of a FLA can look like, find an example of the results below
Accessible health facilities are a critical component of improving the health and quality of life for people with disabilities.
However many designers, architects, healthcare providers, governments and other stakeholders involved in developing health facilities are not sensitized to disability, and lack knowledge and tools to improve accessibility. The task of making facilities accessible can seem daunting.
In collaboration with Philips, we developed a starter kit for designing an inclusive health facility. This guide provides tips, methods and considerations for professionals seeking to create spaces that are disability inclusive, and work better for everyone. We recommend this starter kit to anyone wondering where to start in the process of designing a disability-inclusive health facility. This publication serves as an essential resource to (re)imagine a design of a health facility that guarantees access to services to everyone, including people with disabilities.
If you have any feedback or question on the starter kit, please write to us at info@themissingbillion.org with the heading “Design starter kit”.
