Ian had always considered himself to have a good understanding of accessibility – until he himself ended up requiring the use of a wheelchair.
As the owner of a successful IT consultancy, Ian had ensured that when the business moved to converted stables, it was ‘disability friendly’, with a ramp installed alongside the steps for wheelchair users and a ground floor disabled toilet.
He said: “We really believed we understood what disabled access meant because we had the disabled stickers on the toilet door to prove it! It was not until I was in a wheelchair myself that I realised the ramp was not wide enough to turn around and the ‘disabled’ toilet was just a standard ground floor toilet; you couldn’t even get a wheelchair in there let alone turn around.”
In spring 2007, Ian’s life changed dramatically. Just one week after getting married, he was rushed into hospital with a mystery virus. A month later, after waking from a coma, Ian was told he had been diagnosed with Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM), a rare inflammatory condition that affects the brain and spinal cord.
At just 47, the former mechanical engineer and IT consultant had been left blind, unable to speak and paralysed from the neck down.
Ian spent almost a year in hospital undergoing physiotherapy. He regained his sight, his speech and started to develop upper body movement before eventually leaving hospital late 2007. Upon returning home to his bungalow, Ian required a special hospital bed with hoist which could only be placed in the living room. Whilst Ian had lost his bedroom, the wider family had lost their key shared space.
Over the coming years, Ian and his wife made further adaptions, including extending the property to add a wet room and adding a ramp to access the front door – which was not initially wide enough for Ian’s wheelchair to pass through.
“After three or four years and after all that work, I could still only access about two thirds of the bungalow and even then, there wasn’t a lot of space for me to turn around,” he said.
Shortly before his 55th birthday, Ian moved into Extra Care. Housing 21 is committed to ensuring its schemes are accessible, with designs including wide corridors and doorways, lifts and slow releasing doors in communal areas. In resident apartments, there are open plan kitchens/ living rooms and wet rooms, all of which can accommodate wheelchair users. Schemes are also designed to be dementia friendly, with wayfinding paths in the gardens and colour themes for each floor to help with recognition.
Ahead of Ian moving in, Housing 21 made personal adaptations to make his apartment accessible, including lowering the sink, cooker and worktops in the kitchen and ensuring there was enough space for him to accommodate his knees beneath the surfaces.
“It’s not until you live with a disability you realise there’s not a one-size-fits-all. Something is only accessible if it suits the individual needs of that individual person,” he said.
“Someone once said to me ‘Don’t put us in a box; if you do, we will just climb back out of it’ because everyone is different; it’s about personalising things to individual needs. You can make places generally accessible but to make them really fit for purpose, you need to know the individual and their specific needs.
“For me, I am looking at life from a seated position and the world has a completely different complexion. There’s no point lowering surfaces and sinks if I then can’t fit my knees underneath to reach the bowl to brush my teeth. That’s Housing 21’s strength; the buildings are generally accessible but then they work with individuals to support their specific requirements.”
Since moving to Housing 21, Ian has said it is not just the physical design of the building that makes it accessible, but all the additional factors including the on-site Care Workers and local community.
“Every Friday there’s about half a dozen of us that go to the bar, have a laugh and put the world to rights. All of this is what goes into making this a home that is accessible as it’s somewhere you can live your life and enjoy it,” he said.