About Disability Voices in Healthcare

Purpose & Principles

Everything we do is guided by a clear mission, a hopeful vision, and strong values. These keep us focused on making healthcare fair, respectful, and inclusive for people with disability.

To make healthcare more inclusive, respectful, and accessible for people with disability by gathering lived experiences, turning them into evidence, and using that evidence to advocate for lasting change.

A future where people with disability are treated with dignity, respect, and equality within every part of Australia’s healthcare system.

  • Honesty: telling the truth about the state of healthcare, no matter how hard it is to hear.
  • Respect: treating every person, family, and carer with dignity.
  • Compassion: listening deeply and responding with care.
  • Equality: fighting for healthcare that values people with disability the same as anyone else.
  • Integrity: ensuring all research is transparent, ethical, and trustworthy.
  • Contribution: making a positive difference through collective voices.

Why We Exist

Right now, the healthcare system in Australia is failing people with disability.

  • Too many lives are cut short by preventable deaths.

  • Patients are spoken over, ignored, or treated as “less than”

  • Families and carers are left out, even though they know the person best.

Other disability organisations fight for change across many areas of life. But Disability Voices in Healthcare is different. We focus only on healthcare inequities.

We exist to ensure people with disability are heard within the healthcare system, and to turn those voices into real, systemic change.

Melissa’s Story

Disability Voices in Healthcare was founded by Melissa Ryan.

Melissa has lived with Cerebral Palsy her entire life. She knows what it feels like to face barriers in the healthcare system, to be dismissed, or to not be listened to. Through her experiences and the countless stories she has heard from others, she recognised the urgent need to create change.

Melissa created this project so that people with disability, families, and carers could come together, share their experiences, and have their voices turned into evidence that cannot be ignored.

Her vision is simple: no person with disability should ever be treated as “less than” in healthcare again.

Together, We Can Change Healthcare

Your voice is powerful. When combined with others, it is unstoppable.