Accounting for disability: Customer feedback or citizen complaints?

This paper has two aims. First, it will summarise the findings of a study of the views and experiences of adults with acquired physical impairments. This entailed taking open-ended accounts from respondents in order to elicit their concerns and experiences. The paper will focus on two aspects of data from the study: views about health and social services; and those about citizenship. The second aim of the paper is to situate the role and status of personal accounts of disability within the health and social policy context of recent years, which has been characterised by both consumerism and an intensification in the activities of the disability movement. In the run up to the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act, it became clear that the purchasers (now 'commissioners') of health and social services would be encouraged to elicit users' views of services, to engender a needs-led not provider-led approach. Later in the paper we will discuss the relationship between this officially endorsed consumerism and the concerns of disabled people when voicing their views. It will be argued that personal accounts of disability have gained a cultural currency because of the convergence of processes linked to consumerism within recent British health and social policy on one side and new social movements on the other.