Submission to the Health Research Council draft Pacific Strategy. May 2005.

The Foundation welcomes the draft strategy and applauds its visionary nature.

The 2001 Disability Survey indicates that disabled Pacific people have high needs for health and disability support services. Not all those needs are currently being met.

Consistent with the mission set forth in the Pacific Strategy, the Foundation hopes that the HRC might actively encourage research in two areas in which our society needs to build knowledge:

• The health-related experiences of Pacific people with disabilities.
• The habilitation and rehabilitation interventions that can best support disabled Pacific people to lead healthy and socially active lives.

What strategies can reduce the health-related constraints experienced by Pacific people who have temporary or lasting disability?

Areas of overlap between health conditions and acquired disability (e.g. Type II diabetes) challenge researchers to have an understanding of how Pacific and other vision-impaired people live with their vision impairment, day to day. We believe that this contextual awareness is essential to the Pacific Strategy and would like to see wording to reflect its centrality.

The Foundation endorses the cooperation between health, research, tertiary, and community sectors envisaged by the HRC.