Daisy Hill doctor tells Trust board of plans for new role as Disability Advocate

The post – currently a one-year role as part of a trial scheme – was created at the request of Trust HR director Vivienne Toal, and the new Disability Advocate has spent the summer devising a plan which she hopes to implement as part of her new role.

The specialty GP, who works in the Emergency Department of Daisy Hill Hospital, was at times emotional when she mentioned the dismissive attitude of some patients and former colleagues alike, on account of her disability – which pushed her close to resigning on many occasions.

This culminated in an incident where, having just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, someone within management suggested she should stick to being a parent and quit her chosen profession.

Thankfully, the team Dr Corrigan is now working with is incredibly supportive, however some tricky issues remain, such as the fact that there isn’t a single wheelchair-accessible staff toilet within the entire Trust area, including at Daisy Hill Hospital – meaning that she is having to use patients’ facilities.

Introducing Dr Corrigan at last Thursday’s (September 26) Trust board meeting, the HR director commented: “Clodagh has been working over the summer around some of the plans and actions that we want to take forward.

“And I’m going to hand over to Clodagh, because she’s going to be much more able to eloquently outline just a lot of the work [planned], and certainly [tell us] a wee bit about her background as well and why this role is important to her.”

Addressing the board panel, Dr Corrigan commented: “So I’m Clodagh Corrigan. I am a specialty doctor, and despite the wheels, I work in Daisy Hill ED, and I always tell people ‘We don’t do things too fast any more, so the wheels don’t really matter’.

“What is the purpose of this role? So, the idea is that we’ve got somebody visible, someone who is willing to speak out and be an advocate for people within the Trust, be they staff, students or managers with disabilities, long-term conditions, who feel alone.

“I haven’t always been a wheelchair user, and until my disability became visible, I felt very alone.

“So having someone who’s out there, who’s visible, is accessible to provide support, be it to a staff member, student or to the line management, I think is a really important part of improving the equality and the inclusivity of our organisation.

“I’m there to try and signpost staff to support services wherever they need it, or again, to signpost management to guidance for reasonable adjustments, or whatever it is that’s causing an issue within a particular service, particular directorate, for a particular staff or student.

“It may be that it’s just a matter of sitting down and talking, giving advice, listening, because sometimes all a person needs is an ear, and airing the issues can be really therapeutic.

“And also having a Disability Advocate within the Trust is a quality improvement, it’s moving our Trust forward.

“And with EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), an awful lot of it is conflated with race and culture, and the disability, particularly in healthcare, gets swept under the carpet because we’re unseen.

“You don’t see disabled people within medicine, within healthcare, and you just get forgotten.

“So if we can improve the visibility, improve the access to people, and even students coming up through schools, so that they see ‘Oh, well, I can have a disability and work, I can have a disability and be a doctor or be a nurse or be a physio, it is okay, I can have these things’.

“That is going to improve the quality of our service and the quality of what we provide to our patients, because it’s an entirely different lived experience that a healthcare worker with a disability – be it physical or mental health or a long-term condition or a neurodiversity – It’s an entirely different perspective that that individual can bring to service users’ care, and it will also help with recruitment and retaining staff.

“I can’t tell you how many resignation letters I’ve written. I’m 14 years qualified. I would hope to have quite a long career ahead of me, but I’ve written a number of resignation letters because of that lack of support, because of that closed-door attitude.

“It comes from management, it comes from colleagues, but it comes from your patients as well.

“I couldn’t tell you how many patients I’ve had say things to me along the lines of ‘You’re not much of a doctor if you can’t fix yourself, are you?’.

“Your patients don’t expect you to be disabled either. So it’s coming at you from all angles.

“Without that advocacy, without that visible person who is willing to stand up and go ‘This is okay’, you’re very alone.

“So that is the ‘what’ of this role, and the ‘why’, I’ve touched on it a little bit.

“That was said to me, ‘You can’t be a doctor, a mummy and a patient, reconsider your career’.

“That was said to me as a trainee by a consultant within our Trust, by my supervisor at a time when my daughter wasn’t quite two.

“I had been newly diagnosed with my condition as multiple sclerosis. I wasn’t using my wheelchair, and I needed time out for treatment, and that was what was said to me, and that’s why I left training.

“I’m now a specialty doctor. I’m very well supported. I have an absolutely fantastic line management system, and that’s what’s kept me in my job. That’s why we need this.

“I was so alone, and I felt like there was nobody else in the entire Trust who could possibly have a disability, and it’s very hard to overcome that, it’s very, very tough.

“So, having someone who is willing to stand up and go ‘This is okay’ [and help facilitate] the mainstreaming of disability is really vital.

“I know as a wheelchair-using doctor I’m a unicorn, there’s not very many of us. I have colleagues and friends in the mainland, but we are few and far between.

“But 80% of people with disabilities are invisible. There is an enormous amount of neurodiversity and neurodivergence, which is becoming more and more socially acceptable.

“So we are seeing it more and more in our workforce, and because it is becoming more acceptable to be autistic or more acceptable to be dyslexic, you’re not the weirdo, because there’s more understanding of it.

“But one in five adults in the UK population has a disability. Our staff disclosure rate is somewhere in the region of 2%, so it’s not conceivable to think that we are 10 times less likely to have people within our staff who have a disability.

“So it’s trying to encourage the rest of the people to come forward and contribute, and be confident in the ability to speak out and to disclose their disability, disclose their condition, and bring the extra value that they have from their life perspective, to their work and to their patient care, and how we can achieve that.

“So it’s a personal advocacy. It’s the personal contact and the staff users having a point of contact that they can come to and say ‘I’m struggling here’ or ‘I need some support’.

“It’s a systems approach, looking at our policies, looking at the inclusivity and the equitability.

“We talk a lot about equality, but equitability gets forgotten about. You know, treating everybody the same is equality, making things fair for everybody is equitable, and that’s much more important than treating everybody the same.

“So, making our policies equitable and making things fair and accessible for everybody. So I’m looking at things like our time-off-work policy, inclusion of disability-related sickness absence, coding it differently, so that if I need to be off four times in the year, four separate events, one day four times a year for treatment, I’m not pulled in front of a sickness management panel and questioned as to why.

“Being pulled in front of the panel, even if you know it’s all going to be okay at the end, it’s still stressful.

“So it’s trying to improve those kinds of things that are easy and cost-neutral. It doesn’t cost any more to code an absence as disability-related.

“It’s not about increasing the amount of sickness absence that a person can have, it is just the coding of it.

“And then improving access to reasonable adjustments with managers, explaining to managers that reasonable adjustments are about the equitability.

“It’s not a menu. You can’t just say ‘Well, this person’s autistic, therefore these are the adjustments. This person has MS, therefore these are the adjustments’.

“It’s about tailoring, and making it fair and a level playing field for that individual to do their job.

“And sometimes managers get it, and sometimes managers don’t, just like everybody else.

“So, it’s about trying to promote that openness, and that ability to have a frank and supportive conversation, rather than feeling it’s a threat or an accusation or anything like that.

“And then organisationally, looking at the facilities that the Trust has. Does anybody know how many accessible staff toilets we have in the Trust? The answer is none.

“It’s not going to be reasonable or achievable or realistic to go and rip out all the toilets in the Trust, but at Daisy Hill, we redid the staff toilets in the last 12 months, and it doesn’t fit a wheelchair.

“So, trying to plan where there are improvements being made, or where there’s new doors being fitted, [to make sure] that they’re electric.

“I have three colleagues in Daisy Hill with stomas who would benefit from accessible toilets.

“I have multiple colleagues with arthritis who find it quite difficult to get up off a low toilet, who find it difficult to open the heavy fire doors.

“So having them on a push button would make a simple but very real difference.

“It’s not about gutting the buildings and making every single door a push-button door, but where work is happening that the planning goes into making sure it’s accessible, because that will benefit our staff, but it will also benefit our service users as well.

“It’s a 12-month pilot project. I’m obviously here to sell myself and hope that the money can be found going forward.

“There is national interest. I’ve had conversations with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Lourda Geoghegan.

“So the Department is interested, but it’s as always, where is the money coming from? So I very much appreciate that Vivienne found some loose change in the couch to get this.

“But I think this will be something that would benefit our organisation. It will help to recruit, will help to retain, and will help to move our organisation forward, if we can keep it all going,”

Trust board member, Pauline Leeson thanked Dr Corrigan for her vision and enthusiasm in her new role, commenting: “Well, Dr Clodagh, we do see you. That was a very powerful presentation, so thank you so much.

“And I know you’ve already been active, you’ve got an action plan. So I am actually, personally very excited to see what impact you’re going to have on this Trust. I wish you so well in this new post.”