Tell your governments what you think about the Care Strategy! In September the European Commission published the European Care Strategy, including recommendations on long-term care and early childhood education. The recommendation on early childhood education unambiguously calls on EU member states to include disabled children into mainstream services and to this end improve accessibility. We welcome these statements.
On the other hand, the recommendation on long-term care addresses disability from the perspective of the medical model of disability. Residential services are embraced as an option to take care of disabled people. This is unacceptable! The only acceptable solutions of disability support are personal assistance and home care services which place maximum control in the hands of the disabled person. The only actors who can now change these recommendations are the national governments. As a European network we are not in a good position to address national governments without at least one member from the same country. We are therefore launching:
An urgent action to contact member state government
Together with you, we want to send letters to national governments, containing amendments and asking for changes to the planned recommendation on long-term care. You can read the draft letter and our amendments here. You can find a full statement on the Care Strategy here. The support you already gave made it possible for us to send letters to the governments of Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and Spain. To see all letters that have been send, click here.
You want to support our campaign with your name as well? You can support one of the letters already published and we will add you to the list of supporters. If we receive a significant number of new supporters to a published letter we will inform the respective government of the increase in support. This will proof that we are serious! The government of your country has not received a letter yet? No problem! As soon as you declare your support we will draft a letter to your government with your name listed as a supporter.
To declare that you support our action against the EU Care Strategy simply fill out this brief form.
For questions you can contact our policy coordinator, you can contact our campaign coordinator florian.sanden@enil.eu.
