He stated that most healthcare centres in the country have been inaccessible by PWDs despite the existence of the Disability Act since 2006, which gave institutions ten years to modify their buildings to become disability friendly.

He said this at a forum held to brief the media on a stigma research conducted in the Greater Accra and Northern regions purposely to provide evidence to demonstrate the challenges faced by PWDs in accessing SRHR.

Mr Adam mentioned that communication gap and perception of health workers was the major cause of the inability of PWDs to fully access SRHR and enjoy basic sexual needs like any other person would.

He expressed worry about how families see PWDs among them as incapable because a doctor declared them incapacitated and advised health workers to be careful of their choice of words because, disability does not make a person incapacitated.

The research was focused on the physical environment, perception of health workers regarding disability, inclusive programming in the health sector, the role of culture that suppress PWDs, and the awareness of various legislations that sought to promote access to health service delivery.

The research found out that health workers believed that disability was contagious despite their level of education, which in reality was a wrong assumption and this called for more enlightenment for health workers so as to erase such perceptions.

Another challenge discovered by the research was that, health workers often did not keep confidential information they took from PWDs, which made them uncomfortable in utilizing health centres.

The GFD had asked that, some provisions in the Disability Act, especially, section 60 be implemented and tallied with the Builder's code launched by the Ghana Standard Authority (GSA) to ensure that, all buildings were accessible to PWDs.

The findings of the research called for the need to ensure availability of information and communication materials that were meant to address the health needs of people and must as well target PWDs.

There had been calls for the inclusion of PWDs in designing health programmes, by creating disability desks in all health centres, in order to know their main challenges and how to address them.

The Disability Act did not have enough provision for women and children who may stand to face more health challenges and as such required that the Act be amended to conform to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disability.

The revision of the Act and its effective implementation will go a long way to enable Ghana as a nation to address the SRHR needs as well as other basic needs of PWDs.