Working from home during COVID-19 as a disabled employee

First of all, I hope you are all keeping safe and well and managing to adjust to home working as best you can. Please remember to be kind to yourselves whenever you can.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought us all some huge challenges, homeworking being just one of them. We know that many of our disabled colleagues will experience disability related challenges on top of and related to home working and so we wanted to gather together some resources that may help. 

This first resource we have is a page published by the ‘Business Disability Forum’. It is aimed at employers who need to manage disabled employees and some specific circumstances that may occur during this time. It’s also useful from an employee perspective to help you to work out what rights you have during this time.

The second resource is to help with one of the specific challenges that may be faced by disabled employees, in working from home. It may be the case that our home environments are not set up to support home working in terms of equipment that allows us to work safely and comfortably. You can find SHU’s guidance on obtaining DSE equipment here. Within this guidance there is also a new process for getting specialist equipment that you may want to have a look at. 

The final resource is on support for staying active whilst working from home. Click “get active from home” and then “Disability or long-term health condition”.  It is hosted by Sport England and provides links to workouts suitable for those with a disability or long term medical condition from a number of different organisations and charities.

Written by Stephanie Hannam-Swain.