TRACE – TRansforming Access to health CarE
Project aims to address the inadequate provision of health services to disabled persons by providing appropriate tools to students and health professionals.
Despite the great progress made in the provision of health services to disabled persons, significant obstacles do remain. These include communication gaps, lack of training for health providers, stereotypes and lack of access to infrastructure and medical equipment.
TRACE aims to follow a holistic approach by examining equally all categories of barriers to accessing health services. For this purpose, an interdisciplinary team will implement a training program for students and health professionals to meet the needs of patients with disabilities. The program will be implemented in Thessaloniki in collaboration with the Laboratory of Primary Health Care of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and in other regions in collaboration with the Schools of Health Services in Alexandroupoli, Ioannina and Larissa. The training activities will be accompanied by workshops with stakeholders, in order to achieve the desired interaction between health professionals and people with disabilities, but also advocacy actions. These will be conducted in the aforementioned cities and will be mainly addressed to people with mental disabilities and their partners – caregivers, aiming at raising awareness of disabled persons themselves concerning their rights to health care. Finally, in the framework of the project, the accessibility of health services’ infrastructure will be assessed in order to examine its role in the provision of the desired health service level.
The project will be implemented through a collaboration of the Association of Research and Education in Clinical Skills (ARECS), which will manage and coordinate the project’s actions, with the Non-profit organization ALL – Accessible Limitless Living, whose collaborators have significant experience in implementing educational activities related to disability.
