PIHRS-IH Model 2020-Final Revised

Proper understanding of health care seeking behavior for general illness and the factors
determining health care seeking behavior will help policy makers to design effective
public health interventions in a way that will ensure participation of PWPDs. Moreover,
this information will help policy makers to minimize the barriers to health care seeking
behaviors.
The traditional health network in Bangladesh has general hospitals (known as the Sadar
Hospital) in all districts and sub-districts (known as the Upazila Health Complex), but
clinics are unable to offer appropriate health care to people with disabilities. District and
sub-district-level Government hospitals do not have qualified medical practitioners
specialized in disability; neither there is any allocated services and equipment, nor any
open infrastructure. Medical facilities for people with disabilities are only available in
specialist care establishments far from the population, and are most mostly situated in
the capital city of Dhaka. In Bangladesh, however, access to care for people with
disabilities is comparatively weak compared to other nations, not only because of their
physical and emotional disorders, but also because of the lack of access to facilities in
their poor areas.
Disability- To understand how disability is currently viewed, it is helpful to look at the
way the concept of disability has evolved over time. Historically, disability was largely
understood in mythological or religious terms, e.g. persons with disabilities were
considered to be possessed by devils or spirits; disability was also often seen as a
punishment for past wrongdoing. These views are still present today in many traditional
societies. In the nineteenth and twentieth century’s, developments in science and
medicine helped to create an understanding that disability has a biological or medical
basis, with impairments in body function and structure being associated with different
health conditions. This medical model views disability as a problem of the individual and
is primarily focused on cure and the provision of medical care by professionals.
Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, the individual and medical view of disability was challenged
and a range of social approaches were developed, e.g. the social model of disability. These
approaches shifted attention away from the medical aspects of disability and instead
focused on the social barriers and discrimination that persons with disabilities face.
Disability was reddened as a societal problem rather than an individual problem and
solutions became focused on removing barriers and social change, not just medical cure.
Central to this change in understanding of disability was the disabled people’s movement,
which began in the late 1960s in North America and Europe and has since spread
throughout the world.
Defining Disability- There are many different definitions of disability. The
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states that disability is an evolving
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