People with Disabilities Occupy a Strategic Place in America’s Ability to Compete

The National Council on Disability (NCD) released a report today that addresses trends that could seriously impact the future of services that support people with disabilities–and offers recommendations to ensure future availability and quality of these services.

What are these trends?

• A significant segment of the population is aging. With that comes a significant increase in people developing disabilities.
• The survival rate for children born with birth defects and developmental disabilities is higher.
• More baby boomers are leaving the workforce as retirees.

The trends indicate a growing number of people with disabilities needing services, and a shrinking number of workers trained to provide these services.

The NCD report offers recommendations to meet future demands for services that include developing partnerships among federal departments, state agencies and organizations that provide education and training, healthcare and employment services. The report calls for finding solutions that will attract more workers to the healthcare services industry, and recommends utilizing the talents of people with disabilities.

“People with disabilities occupy a strategic place in America’s ability to compete,” said NCD Chairperson Linda Wetters. Either their talents or ambitions will be developed into a resource for our society, or they will remain on the margins, battling for shrinking resources.”
We couldn’t agree more.

Freedom Disability is looking to hire in the spring. And we’re hoping that some of our new hires will be people with disabilities.  As an advocacy group that helps people get disability insurance benefits, doesn’t that make perfect sense?