The road to the Roadmap

The road to the National Roadmap for Improving the Health of People with Intellectual Disability began with CID’s Chair Shu Hua Chan launching our pre election campaign in 2019. Shu talked about the terrible health inequalities facing people with intellectual disability and finished with a challenge, “Our health counts! Can we count on you?”. Watch Shu’s speech on Facebook.

The Liberal National Government, the Labor Opposition and The Greens made election promises in response to Shu’s challenge.

Health Minister Greg Hunt directed the Department of Health to consult with the intellectual disability community and then develop a Roadmap for action.

The Department led a very collaborative process of co-design working with the intellectual disability and health communities, including people with intellectual disability, family members and key advocacy groups like CID, Inclusion Australia, Down Syndrome Australia and Queenslanders with Disability Network.

This process was delayed by the COVID pandemic but in August 2021 Minister Hunt launched a comprehensive Roadmap for action.
A high proportion of the actions are set to be delivered in the first three years.

While the Roadmap was being developed, Minister Hunt funded some important initial actions:

• Four Primary Health Networks now have programmes to work with local GPs and other primary health services to improve the healthcare that they provide to people with intellectual disability.
• A project to improve the uptake and quality of Medicare annual health assessments that GPs can provide to people with intellectual disability.
• A project to improve the university education received by health professionals in relation to the needs of people with intellectual disability
• Scoping a model for a new National Centre of Excellence in Intellectual Disability Health.

When he launched the Roadmap, Minister Hunt committed to funding the National Centre.

The commitment shown by the political parties at the last federal election and the actions taken by the Government over the last three years provide the foundations for the commitments that CID and our partners are now seeking in this election.

The key commitments we seek are:

• That other parties join the current government’s commitment to implementation of the National Roadmap.
• That there is early funding of the National Centre of Excellence which is vital to driving action on the Roadmap.

Find out more about the campaign Commit to the National Roadmap for Action! End Deadly Disability Discrimination.

CID’s Advocacy Team

Jim Simpson, Senior Advocate