Making it work for everyone

One in five Australians are currently living with a disability. That’s about 4.4 million people who are navigating a world with a visible disability, or one that you might not be able to see.

When we talk about making the world more accessible for this part of the community, we are not talking about giving anyone special treatment, we are talking about making things work for everyone, regardless of their physical and/or cognitive abilities. It is not simply about physical spaces; it’s also about information, technology and environments being usable for people with different abilities and needs.

For many years, we have been working on making Bupa a disability confident workplace, but we are now taking a significant step in formalising this work in our first Access & Inclusion Plan. Building on the great work to date, the plan focuses on working on practical ways to expand our access and inclusion policies and practices for our people, residents and for our customers.

Our inaugural Access & Inclusion Plan, developed in partnership with Australian Disability Network, outlines our commitments under four pillars:

• Our People: We want all of our people to be responsible for fostering an inclusive workplace that ensures everyone feels safe, valued, respected, and empowered to participate to their full potential.
• Accessibility & Choice: We want to remove any unintended barriers to participation for our customers, including through our products and services, and physical and digital spaces.
• Employer of Choice: We want to make sure we have the right recruitment processes, tools and resources in place so that we attract people to work at Bupa who are representative of all of our customers and communities. 
• Community: Building relationships with the right people, communities and organisations to learn, share, and grow based on common values.

Key to the development and execution of this plan is our Access and Inclusion Employee Advocacy Group, AccessAbility. This group of employees with lived experience, who are carers and their Allies have been providing valuable feedback and advice for many years now and have been holding Bupa to account in our commitment to supporting the disability community.

It’s important to acknowledge that while this plan represents an important first step and strong foundation, we still have a long way to go. We hope that, through this plan, we can elevate this important work in creating a more equitable environment that will encourage more people to join our workforce, ensure that workplace meets their needs and ensure we’re meeting the diverse needs of our customers.

You can read the full plan here.