Disability, Labour & Social Protection: A Southern European Research Perspective

Department of Physiotherapy, University of Thessaly (Greece) — Partner Search | HORIZON-CL2-2027-01-TRANSFO-07: Persons with disabilities: opportunities for labour inclusion and social protection through the life course

Our department is looking to form a consortium around this call and would welcome contact from groups whose work intersects with disability, labour inclusion, and social protection policy.

The Greek context offers, we think, a genuinely instructive case for the questions this call is trying to address. Labour market participation among persons with disabilities in Greece remains well below the EU average, and the structural reasons for this are not straightforwardly reducible to employer attitudes or workplace accessibility — though those matter too. What our research experience points to, more persistently, is a systemic disconnection between what rehabilitation services deliver and what the employment and social protection systems subsequently require from the same individuals. People leaving rehabilitation following spinal cord injury, acquired brain injury, or progressive neurological conditions do not typically encounter a coordinated pathway into vocational reintegration. They encounter fragmentation — between sectors, between professional groups, and between the timing of clinical discharge and the availability of meaningful support on the other side of it. Our research group has been working on disability outcomes and community participation for a number of years, most substantively through involvement in the International Spinal Cord Injury Community Survey, a WHO-affiliated study operating across 31 countries. This has given us experience with cross-national data collection, ICF-based functioning and participation assessment, and the methodological challenges of measuring outcomes that are sensitive to very different policy and social environments. We also engage with health systems research, which informs how we think about the structural — rather than purely clinical — determinants of participation outcomes.

For this particular call, our focus would be on the transition moments across the life course where inclusion either becomes possible or breaks down: the move from education into employment, from inpatient or community rehabilitation into working life, and the particular vulnerabilities that emerge as persons with disabilities approach older adulthood without adequate social protection having accumulated. We are interested in how rehabilitation professionals — physiotherapists in particular — might be more systematically positioned within interdisciplinary vocational rehabilitation frameworks, rather than operating upstream of them with little formal interface.

We are seeking partners with expertise in disability policy and law, vocational rehabilitation, social protection systems, assistive technology, and social economy models. We would particularly value collaboration with groups who have established relationships with disability-led organisations, given our interest in ensuring that lived experience informs the project's research design rather than only its dissemination. Partners from Northern and Western European contexts would strengthen the comparative dimension of the work considerably.