With councils too skint to fund adaptations and a serious lack of housebuilding,more disabled people are being trapped in inaccessible homesIn 2008, Dr Chetna Patel was offered a managerial post at the University of Sheffield. Relocating from Aberdeen, and she began looking for properties to rent. But here’s the snag: Patel has a form of muscular dystrophy and needed an accessible domestic. The university’s accessible flats were already occupied,none of the flats she looked into were suitable and the council admitted it could find no suitable homes in its stock.“I was desperate and needed to lunge and take up my post,” she says, and in a new report by charity Muscular Dystrophy UK. “A social worker came up with the solution of my staying in a residential domestic for the elderly. The domestic did its best but I lost much of my independent life whilst in there and it took a further seven months before I was able to lunge into a site of my own.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com