Participants in the meeting included Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council Galina Karelova, Minister of Labour and Social Protection Anton Kotyakov, Healthcare Minister Mikhail Murashko, Chair of the State Duma Committee on Labour, Social Policy and Veteran Issues Yaroslav Nilov and his deputy Mikhail Terentyev, representatives of Kaliningrad, Nizhny Novgorod and Leningrad regions, as well as representatives of public and expert organisations.
The meeting concerned ensuring the right of the disabled to social protection, medical care and medication supplies during the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, as well as measures necessary to ensure the disabled people’s employment.
According to the Federal Registry of People with Disabilities, there were 11.82 million disabled people in Russia as of June 1, 2020, including 698,500 disabled children. The Russian Labour Ministry reported that during the period between January and May 2020, the number of people of employable age with disabilities was 3.4 million while working disabled people account for 27 percent of this number. The same figure was recorded between January and May 2019.
Following a discussion, the meeting participants decided to take measures to improve the job quota allocation system for people with disabilities, and to analyse, in cooperation with private staffing agencies, the number of inquiries from disabled people and the number of job openings offered by employers, to further improve the employment support for people with disabilities and to expand the practice of involving NGOs in these efforts.