Services for People with Disabilities

Recently, I have been reflecting on the way services for people with disabilities are set up in Ireland. People are accepted by an agency and they cannot be clients of two agencies that get government funding. Different agencies seem to serve different types of people and have different geographic areas that they serve. People get services based on what the agencies can give. The government seems to tell agencies how many speech therapists, OTs, physios, etc. they can have. The agencies/health service executives can then apply to the government if they need more staff.

This is a big difference to how services are set up in the U.S. The school is the primary source of therapy. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was first passed in 1975 and mandated free, appropriate, public education for children aged 3-21 with disabilities. It periodically gets reviewed and changed but the basics of the law have stayed the same. So, the schools are responsible for hiring speech therapists, occupational therapists, psychologists, teachers, etc. The therapists then have to support the children's education. There are structures for complaints and every year parents are told exactly how many minutes a week their child will spend with different people (resource teacher, speech therapist, OT, physio). If the services are unable to be provided for some reason, there is resource. There are also health based therapists but they tend to work in different ways and have different clients than the schools.

The differences in these two systems fascinates me. Neither system is perfect. However, I find that being on staff at a school facilitates working relationships.