The DAMA Project - Disabled Advanced Medical Assistance

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) enshrines the right of persons with disabilities to enjoy the highest standard of health and access to health care without discrimination, but persons with disabilities have logistical and assistive support needs that must be known in order to build a health service offer that meets their needs and respects their rights in line with the CRPD. Examples of accessibility of medical care include the removal of an architectural barrier, the adaptation of a protocol, and ensuring information about care is delivered using easy to understand means of communications. An example of full inclusion and accessibility of the healthcare system for persons with intellectual disabilities is the DAMA (Disabled Advanced Medical Assistance), a project developed and tested at the Milan San Paolo Hospital. DAMA is an inclusive service provision methodology and offers a model that can follow, with a multidisciplinary approach, the person at every stage of the diagnostic and clinical pathway, and to support his or her family in dealing with the hospital. The diffusion of the DAMA model has demonstrated the flexibility of the model itself and its ability to adapt to hospitals with different characteristics and dimensions. The future is the institution of an organized network of all DAMA centres that share common clinical protocols and homogeneous archives. It will grant us the capability of collecting consistent epidemiological and clinical data, valuable for scientific researching and for training health personnel.