Co Wicklow HSE primary care teams lack basic respect-times are changing...disabled clients demand more.

having an illness or an impairment is costly:

• It's expensive financially
• It's wearing emotionally & psychologically
• It's restricting & limiting
• It's depressing
• It's isolating                
• It's painful
• It's a struggle

Now most feel that this is due to the illness or impairment itself.  Not so! There is no real reason why to be sick or to have an impairment (disability) should make your life shrivel up to the inside of your home's 4 walls.

Apart from pain, the above list CAN be less onerous if the HSE services (Irish health Services) were at all geared to improving life.  But it isn't.

Community primary care services do NOT seem to regard their role as helping disabled or sick individuals live life to the full. Or is this just my situation! or is this just Co Wicklow?

If the first question asked was "how can we help you live your life to the full?" I would be in a far better position. But that's NOT the first question.  The first question appears to be..."how can I get out of doing Anything for Margaret Kennedy".  With the 2nd question being "How can I save the HSE money?"

It seems to be the case that I am not someone they went into their jobs to help, but to in fact persecute! I am, as one manager said; "not giving workers job satisfaction".  Well no, How can I in conscience praise a worker for a) unprofessional care b) no care, c) poor care...How can I honestly thank a professional worker for supplying me with a wheelchair from hell, ignoring what I say, and abandoning me?  At this point there is not ONE single HSE worker who I feel 'cares' or 'respects' me. So How can I honestly relate to them in a way where they can feel 'job satisfaction'.

In fact it's not I who make their job soulless. It's the government's choice to not give the financial wherewithal for professional's to do a good job. They haven't the resources and they are simply playing games with 'service users'. Pretending to offer a service when in fact they are not.

It's the pretence I'm supposed to be grateful for.  Why?

I supposed to be grateful for:

•  a crap powered wheelchair
• a non-existent service
• rude and offensive managers
• who lie (or at least; 'economy with the truth') and deny
• A service that actively refuses me respect, a voice or equality
• which runs roughshod over all policy documents concerning my rights

and has polished the art of letter-writing in such a 'political' way that everyone THINKS the HSE are wonderful and I am a mega-monster client!

I'm NOT a mega-monster. I refuse to be cowed. Refuse to accept a service that only exists to dis-empower, refuse to say something is OK when it's patently not.

I am an empowered disabled woman. Not to be shoved around. I am not malleable like putty. I won't be subservient.

I won't play the HSE game. I will continually demand that I be part of the solution, not just someone who is to be told what the solution is.

This, of course, is NOT what we sick and/or disabled people are supposed to be like.

So whilst the managers continue to try and batter me & my twin into the ground, into submission...We resist.  They don't like this. Not one little bit.

well...I and my twin have RIGHTS. It's time the HSE Co Wicklow caught up with disability strength and self-respect.

It's time Co Wicklow worked from that rights & respect perspective.

We are no longer in the Dickensian or Victorian age. It's an age of collaboration. Co Wicklow has to embrace it. Disabled people demand it. NOW!