Disabled people in Britain and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This paper reports on in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with 69 disabled people in England and Scotland, and with 28 key informants from infrastructure organisations in the voluntary and statutory sectors, about the impact of COVID-19, and measures taken to control it. Participants were recruited through voluntary organisations. As with everyone, the Pandemic has had a huge impact: we discuss the dislocations it has caused in everyday life; the failures of social care; the use of new technologies; and participants' view on leadership and communication. We conclude with suggestions for urgent short term and medium term responses, so that the United Kingdom and other countries can respond better to this and other pandemics, and build a more inclusive world.

Rights

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.© 2021 The Authors. Social Policy & Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Identifiers

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/spol.12758

Repository URI

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/249373/