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Abstract #154499
Audio (mp3) recordingDaniel Mont, PhD, Disability and Development Team, HDNSP, The World Bank, 1818 H St., NW, Mail Stop G-704, Washington, DC 20433, 202-473-5366, dmont@worldbank.org
Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), a common indicator for assessing the relative impacts of public health interventions, explicitly incorporates disability. However, the conceptualization of disability embodied in the DALYs is not consistent with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) or the social model of disability model upon which it draws. Instead, it is based on a medical model that ties disability to medical diagnoses. As a result, DALYs do not give credit to public health interventions that improve the lives of disabled people by mitigating or accommodating their functional statuses. This paper builds on this point, expressed in an upcoming paper in The Lancet (Mont, 2007), by running simulations of policy interventions in Zambia, and using detailed data collected on activity and participation limitations to determine how those interventions could be assessed differently using DALYs and using indicators that are more tied to the social model of disability and Amartya Sen's capability approach. Increased attention is being paid to inclusive development, as witnessed by the recent signing of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, it will be important to construct indicators that can properly assess the effects of public health policies and
Learning Objectives:
- Discuss the usefulness of DALYs for evaluating public health interventions
- Analyze alternate approaches to measuring disability based on the social model of disability
- Assess the usefulness of alternate approaches using a case study in Zambia
Keywords: Disability, Developing Countries
Related Web page: www.worldbank.org/disability
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Any relevant financial relationships? No
Any institutionally-contracted trials related to this submission?
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.
The 135th APHA Annual Meeting & Exposition (November 3-7, 2007) of APHA