Browsing by Subject "disability"
Now showing items 1-6 of 6
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(2011)Objectives. The thesis objective was to analyze how person-centred planning is applied to develop short term care in interaction between the disabled children, their families and the workers of the family service centre of Eteva Järvenpää. The thesis contributes to developing the methods of person-centred planning. I applied theoretical frameworks of activity theory and developmental work research, family-based work framework and disability phenomenon. The research questions were: What development needs did the families of disabled children have for the services? How were viewpoints of disabled children, their families and Eteva workers noticed in person-centred planning in the interaction between the disabled children, their families and Eteva workers? What disturbances and development challenges emerged during the person-centred planning? Methods. I first analysed the local history of the disability sector and the short term care to analyse challenges arising from the local history. The actual research material consisted of interviews with four families, two person-centred planning discussions and two discussions where the person-centred planning was reflected by the families.I used interaction voice analysis as defined by the activity theory and developmental work research. From the recorded interviews and discussions I analysed scripts, disturbances, innovation attempts and innovations. From the discussions I analysed also the interaction types (cooperation, coordination and communication). Results and conclusions. As problems, the families considered the scarce resources and the inflexibility of services. The challenges of developing the short term care were how to transfer information from short term care to home, how to develop activities for the children and how to take into account the individual needs of the children in the short term care. Both from the local history analysis and from the family interviews arised the conflict between caring and fulfilling the individual needs. In person-centred planning, the voice of the child was either interpreted by other family members or guided by family members or workers. I modelled the progress of person-centred planning in a two-dimensional coordination. Person-centred planning should be deepened in cooperation between the child, the family and the workers in everyday situations at home and during the short term care. The challenge is to expand person-centred planning to become cross-organizational cooperation connecting the actors of the child's service network in everyday life.
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(2014)Objectives of the study: Multidiscipline knowledge is needed in evaluation of person's functional capacity in work: physical and psychosocial factors must be considered. Generic models and tools are needed to provide common practices to evaluate work-ability (or demands of the work) and to understand the relevance of multifaceted factors underneath. Reflective processing of one's own knowledge and intuitions is seen to improve a person's ability to understand the relevance of unfamiliar information and to achieve a higher cognitive congruence in a multi-professional group. That can be achieved through group-learning practices. In a current research effect of IMBA- methods training is studied. It is assumed that training will increase the cognitive congruence between professionals evaluating work-ability. Methods: Three training groups were arranged in 2005. 51 professionals of vocational rehabilitation participated (43 women and 8 men). They evaluated both the functional capacities of a person and the demands of work before and after their IMBA-training. Evaluations were done on the basis of written case-information. The data of these evaluation tasks is data of this study. Both independent samples and repeated measures settings was used. The effect of training is analyzed as a measure of absolute agreement indexes (ICC and rrg) Results and conclusions: The results agreed with the hypothesis: After IMBA training the level of absolute agreement was higher in evaluating both the demands of work and the functional capacities of a person. Differences between training groups, features of the task or familiarity of the material didn't seem to influence the effect. Agreement got higher in evaluating physical and psychosocial factors of workability. The effect was very systematic. The evaluations were more congruent after training even though the effect was not strong enough to reach statistical significance with these samples. What was surprising was that demands of work were systematically evaluated lower after training as the functional capacities of persons were evaluated the same or a little higher after the training. Interesting question is: Do the professionals overestimate the demands of the work in general when making evaluations based on their intuitive thinking? If that's the case, the customers of vocational rehabilitation are seen as more disabled compared to demands the work than they are in real. The possibility of a systematic error like this in evaluating workability must be studied more in the future.
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(2013)My master's thesis is a study of citizenship and its ideals in disability policy from the perspective of critical ability studies. The main focus of ability studies is to analyze ableism and how it produces ideals of perfect humanness. Therefore, from the perspective of ableism these ideals produce disability and impairments as something intolerable as well as inherently and ontologically negative. My study focused on the disability policy paradigm as it is after the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities from the year 2006. The disability policy paradigm emphasizes both the rights of people with disabilities to full citizenship and their participation in society. The study data included 20 documents from European, national and municipal disability policies, released from 2006 onwards. In this study I explored how ableism defines the construction of full citizenship and how ableism affects individual's possibilities to participate as citizen according to the current disability policy. As my research method, I applied interpretative reading style based on the New Rhetoric. In the current disability policy paradigm the ideal of full citizenship is based on individualistic and neoliberalistic views, which emphasize self-mastery and independence. This ideal is impossible for people with disabilities because self-mastery and independence are defined as autonomy from other people and social services. Moreover, falling short from the ideal is located in ontologically negative space. Subsequently the bodies with impairments are always seen as imperfect and defective as well as economically burdening. Emphasizing the physical imperfectness of individuals defines their possibilities to participate in society because this participation is emulating the ideal. Also, the individuals with disabilities are forced to repeat their imperfectness in order to obtain social services, which enable participation. Ontological discrimination of people with disabilities is evident in the disability policy, even though it contradicts the aims of the policy.
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(2011)The aim of this study was to examine accessibility in folk high schools from the perspective of students with disabilities or learning difficulties. Accessibility in education means that psychological, sociological and physical environment enables equal study opportunities. Therefore the focus in this survey was on equal study opportunity deficiencies. Folk high schools are an essential subject for accessibility research as they follow the equal educational policy of liberal adult education. This study is a part of Liberal adult education -research project (2010-2012), which is the first accessibility research in Finnish liberal adult education. The equality-based claim of accessibility together with the need to separate the experiences of students with disabilities and learning difficulties from common experiences led naturally to comparative research frame. Firstly, experiences of the experimental group (students with disabilities or learning difficulties, N=278) were compared to experiences of the comparison group (students representing the educational majority, N=498). Secondly, experiences within the experimental group were examined according to gender, need of support and educational background. This study was mostly quantitative survey study. Data was collected from folk high school students with an inquiry created for this study. Data-analysis was mainly made by using analysis of variance (GLM) and test of Kruskal-Wallis. Qualitative data was analysed as an additional element by quantification. Equal study opportunity deficiencies were found in teaching and studying, other people's awareness and attitudes, own attitudes, information and peer group, where the experimental group found significantly more accessibility deficiencies than the comparison group. The most considerable difference was found in teaching and studying, wherein also the quality of deficiencies was explained differently between the groups. Within the experimental group women experienced more accessibility deficiencies than men. Also regular and great need of support and low educational background were connected with the experience of greater accessibility deficiencies. As a conclusion it seems that the equality-based accessibility in folk high schools could be improved especially by differentiating teaching and learning. This study also proved general need for more exact definition of the intention of accessibility: is the priority to develop common quality or equality of education, and is the aim to remove the barriers or advance support to overcome them.
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(2015)Aims: Public health care in Finland has the main responsibility of rehabilitation, which means that public health care has to provide for persons with the severe disabilities the therapy or the rehabilitation needed. If a person fulfills the criteria of having severe disablity he is admitted Disability Allowance at its middle or highest rate. This is required for getting medical rehabilitation for persons with severe disabilities, which in Finland is financed by KELA. The speech therapy for the severely disabled organized by KELA is mainly carried out by private sector. There were approximately 500 private speech therapists under the contract of KELA during 2011-2014. Altogether 7439 persons were receiving speech therapy by KELA in 2014. The speech therapists under the contract of KELA are divided somewhat unevenly in Finland, therefore the availability of speech therapy is not equal in the whole land. Particularly areas with less inhabitants seem to suffer from inequality. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 3.5.2008 was aimed at guaranteeing equal human rights to disabled people and to promote and support their human value. Methods: This Master's thesis looks at the availability of speech therapy in Finland both quantitatively based on open statistics by KELA and qualitatively on the nature of positive and negative decisions in the Medical District of Kanta-Häme. Results and Conclusions: The availability of speech therapy for persons with severe disabilities is not by KELAs statistics fully equal in Finland. The uneven division of speech therapists has lead to the fact that there are for example, at the insurance district of Oulu considerably more speech therapists than at the insurance district of Satakunta.The speech therapists under contract of KELA are like many other highly educated people situated close by the universities and other schooling areas, By U.N agreement the persons with disabilities should have rehabilitation near where they live and timing it optimally.The severity of language impairment was the main reason in positive decisions in the Medical District of Kanta-Häme and the insufficiency of arguments in the negative ones, which seem to refer to the fact that there, with an adequate application, speech therapy is guaranteed for the persons with most severe disabilities. One of the aims of the future social welfare and health care reform is to improve the availability of speech therapy in Finland. It remains to be seen how successfully it will answer the growing need.
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(2016)Previous studies have examined quality of life among people with traumatic brain injury (TBI) using quantitative measures and/or structured questionnaires. Recently some studies have focused on the patient's own perception of TBI and used the International Classification of Functioning, Disabilities and Health (ICF) framework to examine quality of life from a wider perspective of functioning. The aim of this study was to examine: What kind of occasions do the participants report as the happiest or unhappiest after TBI, and how are these related to the life areas within the ICF framework. An additional aim was to examine how are these life areas, as well as demographics variables, injury severity, and emotional state associated with the individuals' quality of life. A total of 233 Finnish persons with TBI participated in the Wave 1 of the international QOLIBRI (Quality of Life after Brain Injury) validation study in 2004—2006. The individuals' own descriptions about the happiest/unhappiest occasions were linked to the most precise ICF categories. Correlation and regression analysis were used to examine the association with demographic variables, injury related variable, emotional state, most frequently reported life areas and perceived quality of life. The most frequently reported life areas for both happy and unhappy occasions were Interpersonal interactions and relationships, followed by Community, social and civic life in happy occasions, and Mental functions and Services, systems and policies in both happy and unhappy occasions. Regression analysis showed that younger age, longer post-traumatic amnesia, fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, happy occasion related Mental functions and Community, civic and social life, and not reporting an unhappy occasion related to Mental functions, yet reporting unhappy occasions related to Interpersonal interactions and relationships, were associated with higher perceived quality of life. The results of this study are in line with previous studies that have shown emotional state, age, and injury severity as factors relevant to quality of life after TBI. Additionally, this study informs clinicians about the life areas that individuals with TBI themselves experience as most relevant to their quality of life. From the individuals' perspective, rehabilitation should focus on supporting social relationships, participation in community activities, using services and helping the persons to cope with the demands of the environment. Furthermore, individuals need emotional support to adapt to their new life situation.
Now showing items 1-6 of 6