Just Include Me: Laura’s Story

Laura Naing is an Inclusion Projects Worker at CID. In this video, Laura shares her health story and how a health worker did not engage with her inclusively. Laura highlights how the Just Include Me Inclusive Health Care e-learning series can give professionals the tools to support better health outcomes for people with intellectual disability.

You can complete the training on HETI or Medcast.

Learn more about Just Include Me.

Transcript

OK.

Hello. My name is Laura. I work at Council for Intellectual Disability. I am from the health team at CID. Our job is to make health services better for people with intellectual disability.

CID made a free online course for health workers. I want to tell you a couple of things that went wrong with my health care and why this course for health workers is so important.

A few years ago I had a respiratory doctor specialist that did not communicate in an inclusive way with me. The first time I met with him he did not explain how long to wait between tests. I did so many CT scans without without any breaks. I trusted him because he was my doctor. He also gave me the wrong medication. He did not warn me that you could only take it for a little while. He did not tell me about the side effects.

This probably happened because he did not give me accessible information to understand how to take the medicine. If my doctor just made some simple adjustments when communicating with me the outcome would have been very different. Explaining things in simple terms, giving clear step-by-step instructions and just checking that I understood would have made a huge difference. This is called inclusive health care.

We have made this training for health workers so people with intellectual disability can live better lives.

Thank you for listening to my story. I hope you learn more and do the training.