KEY POINTS:
Wheelchair users took to the streets yesterday in support of an elderly Takanini couple who are still trapped on separate floors of their house more than a year after the lift that connected them broke down.
Barbara Broome, 77, has multiple sclerosis and her motorised wheelchair is too big for the new lift that was installed in November last year, so she has been trapped upstairs, where she can use her specially adapted bathroom.
Her husband Arthur, 76, is dying of cancer downstairs. He chose to stay on the ground floor so he could get to hospital quickly if necessary.
It is 385 days since their original lift was taken out and the Broomes are still waiting for a new one.
Auckland wheelchair user Marilyn Woolford, who took part in a protest in Queen St on International Human Rights Day yesterday, said the Ministry of Health's inaction was a breach of the couple's human rights. "She [Mrs Broome] is basically incarcerated. That's why we are holding a banner saying 'Prisoners of incompetence'."
The Auckland president of the Disabled Persons Assembly, Sacha Dylan, has been acting as an advocate for the Broomes and said he was amazed that Mr Broome, who has been under hospice care since returning home to die in September last year, was still alive. "He has just got amazing willpower."
The ministry initially delegated the lift replacement to its agent for disabled people's equipment needs, Accessable.
Mr Dylan said that after several months of inaction, the Broomes asked the ministry to give the job to someone else, and in March it chose Opus Consultants to organise the new lift.
It then took two months for the ministry to negotiate a contract with Opus, whose project manager met the Broomes for the first time in June.
In September, Opus offered the Broomes four options for the new lift. Mr Dylan said the Broomes chose the second-cheapest, which would cost about $80,000, but the ministry and Opus pushed for the cheapest option, costing about $40,000.
In October, Opus called for tenders for the lift, and has not yet chosen a successful tenderer. Mr Dylan understood the tender was for the second-cheapest option as the Broomes asked.
But the ministry's national operations manager for health and disability services, Trish Davis, said the Broomes' preferred option was "beyond the scope of what has been recommended to meet Mrs Broome's needs".
She said the Broomes had been offered alternative interim accommodation, including the option of temporary facilities to allow Mrs Broome to stay downstairs.
Mr Dylan said Mrs Broome had been unable to find wheelchair-accessible accommodation in the Manukau area where she could stay for more than a week and rejected the offer of interim help "because they won't say when they are going to start work, so why would 'interim' mean anything other than permanent"?
The Health and Disability Commissioner's director of advocacy, Judi Strid, said she had tried to mediate and was "perplexed" at the delay.
