Support, Enable, Lead

• Written by: Danielle Farrel — Your Options Understood (Y.O.U) — Managing Director
• Published: 21st July 2025

ALLIANCE Member Danielle tells us what she needs to lead as part of our self management awareness raising campaign for 2025.

When I was asked if I would be interested in writing an opinion piece about what I felt would put me in a position where I was the leader in my own health care, 3 words came to mind.

• Support
• Enable
• Lead

Support me in the discussions around my healthcare

Enable me to participate in them

And allow me to Lead my own pathway.

For these 3 things to happen successfully, professionals actively listening to me and hearing what I’m saying is crucial. I would say more so as an adult in recent years it has become clear to me that this doesn’t happen, not just in my case but for other disabled people too.

If I draw on one example where I was required to be in hospital for a relatively simple procedure, but actually, due to people not listening to me it became far more complicated than it needed to be. I attended the appointment as scheduled following several long conversations about the fact that I require a stand aid for transferring and that I would need this in order to transfer from my wheelchair to the bed for the procedure to be carried out. Despite this, I was put in a position where no stand aid was provided and the appointment had to be rearranged. This might sound insignificant to some, but often when living with a disability nothing is ever simple or at least as simple as it should be.

In the end the hospital funded a taxi for me to take my own equipment to the appointment to enable me to transfer. I made a complaint to highlight that in 2024 (as it was at the time) disabled people should have the right to the same healthcare as non-disabled people. You can listen but not hear, and the difference listening and hearing makes to someone’s healthcare is significant. If I had been listened to and enabled to lead my own healthcare in partnership with the professionals, it would have been a much smoother experience for everyone involved.

Support, enable, lead is key for me when thinking what I need to lead my own healthcare but if I was to add a tagline to that, I would say that ‘communication is key’. That includes communication with the disabled person and those that know them best. Let’s move away from the “does he take sugar in his tea” scenario and where possible talk to the disabled person themselves and work with them. Even when a disabled person doesn’t communicate verbally or when they have limited communication they can still be involved in leading their own healthcare, perhaps just in a different way.

Remembering the phrase ‘support, enable, lead’ is key. If you start with this, you will go a long way.

This opinion piece is being shared as part of the ALLIANCE’s self management awareness campaign. Self Management Week will run from 22-25 September 2025.

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