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With the UK government mandating a gender pay gap reporting by corporates and there is a lot of push for ethnicity pay gap report, there is a need for a similar push for having disability pay gap records, said Jay Muthu, director of Organization and People Capability at Entain Group. "I think we need to kind of lobby the government to make that happen, but unfortunately a lot of disability organisations are still fighting for the basic rights," Muthu said during a panel discussion on Disability Inclusion In The Workplace held during the Pharmacy Business Diversity Conference on Thursday (December 9). The session, moderated by the conference chair and BBC presenter Clive Myrie, also had Kate Nash OBE, founder and chief executive officer of Purple Space, which is the world's only professional development membership hub for disability employee resource groups. Muthu said: "The challenges are from both sides. There is obviously the societal stigma (attached with disability). There are corporations not being aware and not wanting to educate themselves, and then there is the government not really implementing the right kind of mechanisms to make it happen.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has called on the UK government to invest in and reimagine learning disability nursing, as its analysis reveals parts of England risk becoming "learning disability nurse deserts," with student numbers collapsing across all regions and courses closing at an alarming rate. Over the past eight years, the number of acceptances onto learning disability nursing courses in England has dropped by 36 per cent, according to the RCN analysis. In 2024, not a single university in the South East offered the degree. Additionally, the number of learning disability nurses employed in the NHS in England has nearly halved since May 2010, as of July 2024. The RCN has warned that this crisis could leave vulnerable people without access to vital care. It noted that reforms to nursing education, including the removal of the nursing bursary and universal maintenance support for undergraduates, have particularly impacted learning disability nursing, a specialty that depends heavily on mature students.