Audits, surveys, approximate quantities and costs, to enhance management documentation.
As part of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 Section 21 will place a range of new duties upon property managers and owners especially in the public sector. They will be required to:
- Identify the key physical barriers, which currently make it impossible or unreasonably difficult for disabled people to effectively access property.
- Identify the barriers which disabled people themselves consider to be most in need of addressing.
- Recommend strategies for compliance at different levels.
- Provide an estimate of the likely cost of compliance in the case of the NHS from Oct 99 to 2004
The Key Physical Barriers Identified as a result of representative Access Audits
The following key barriers were identified as a result of Physical Access Audits, Focus groups with disabled people and postal survey of disabled peoples recent experiences and recommendations.
- Car parking
- Signage
- Absence of trained assistants
- Lack of Assistive Technology (Including Loop systems, Audio-visual paging Systems, Text phones)
- Information in inaccessible media
- Inaccessible Lavatory and bathing facilities
- Poor physical accesses generally.
Recommended Strategies for Compliance
The priority will be the production of guidelines to ensure that access for disabled people is an intrinsic part of all units, now and in the future.
We are fully conversant with such matters and can offer expertise in both identifying and costing the requirements under the Act, having recently successfully completed several large Metropolitan NHS trust portfolios along with private sector units.
Do not hesitate to contact us for further information for such work.
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