08/29/2026
There are ways to maintain safety while allowing risk. Being able to try new things, and sometimes fail, provides dignity and opportunities to learn and grow.
I understand why safety became the obsession. Disability services have not always been good at keeping people alive.
People have died from neglect, abuse, restraint, choking, constipation, medication errors, and failures to provide basic healthcare. So yes, keeping people safe matters. Keeping people alive matters enormously.
But it cannot become the definition of good support. A person can be alive, physically healthy, taking the right medication, supervised, documented and protected from every imaginable risk and still barely have a life.
Survival should be the starting point, not the goal. The job is not simply to add years to people's lives. It is to make sure there is life in those years.
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ID: Fionn stands in middle of a street in Ireland holding a cardboard sign that reads: Dear Disability Services, Keeping People Alive is Not Enough.
