Disability under the Approaches of Rights and Capabilities and How it Relates to the Public Health

This work aims to analyze the studies conducted on people with disability under the approaches of rights and capabilities considering those aspects interesting in the public health field, such as the inequality, social justice, social determining factors, and well-being of collective groups. A narrative review of the both national and international literature concerning the disability was carried out under both the right approach and the capability approach. Searches were carried out based on keywords in Spanish, English and Portuguese. The quest for information provided 32 documents in total; regarding the approaches under study, 16 papers dealt with rights and disability, 11 papers with capabilities and disability, and 5 papers with both approaches. It can be concluded that the approaches of rights and capabilities have a dichotomous and non-linear relation. Regarding the disability, these two approaches indeed complement each other from their different fields, especially when it comes to cope with the barriers existing between people with disability in the spheres of education, employment and health.