Catherine Hale

  An Introduction to the Chronic Illness Inclusion Project Foreword by Dr Simon Duffy, Director, Centre for Welfare Reform  "I must admit that I had no understanding of the reality, severity and widespread nature of chronic illness until very recently. It was only as we began our own efforts to combat the UK austerity programme, which began in 2010, that we discovered that many of those people we were fighting beside were people with a chronic illness. And, it was only by listening to their experiences that I understood that there were layers of injustice that I had never truly appreciated." Introduction A key aim of the CIIP is to translate our experience of chronic illness into the social model of disability, beginning with the distinction between impairment and disability. In this paper, I argue that, ‘chronic illness’ is a self-ascribed identity which implies both a distinctive form of impairment (in our case, bodily malfunction) and a shared experi