The health status of individuals with ID is below average compared to normal individuals. When compared to their peers, they show tendency to risky behaviors such as smoking cigarettes (21.70-30.50%), low physical activity (11.90-22.40%)
and obesity (19.60-31.20%). While 80% of typically developed individuals indicate their health conditions as well and very well and 6% states that it is bad, this rate in disabled people is respectively 21% and 42% (UNICEF, 2019).
Because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, while the need to protect and improve the health of individuals with disabilities increases, their participation in formal education is decreasing dramatically. While these conditions increase demands for health services, their disadvantages in accessing service also increase. Individuals with ID are able to improve their health literacy with educational activities and their ability to take precautions against risky behaviors. However, special education teachers are not qualified enough to help them to gain these skills (Şahin ve Şahin, 2021).
Turkey signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities of the United Nations just as the other countries in the EU zone. One of the primary concerns of this convention is to protect and improve the health of disabled individuals.
Among the priority areas of the Council of Europe Disability Strategy 2017-2023 is “promote equality and nondiscrimination”. Supporting educational activities is important for this area. The European Commission (EC) adopted the “Union of Equality: Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030” which stated all people with disabilities have equal opportunities, access to participate in society and economy and have access to health care and services. The strategy referred necessity to teach about accessible and anti-discrimination health services and facilities in university
programs. In order to reach the strategic goals in these documents, especially higher education institutions have a wide range of responsibilities such as training of human resources, producing and disseminating information (European University Association, 2020).
When the training programs in Turkey and the EU zone were investigated in this context, there aren’t any university courses
about health protection and health promotion (HP-HP) for individual with ID. Theoretically, 2.5% of society is accepted as
intellectually disabled. According to this, we can come into a conclusion that there are about 2.000.000 individual with ID in
Turkey and 11.000.000 individual with ID in Europe as of 2021. Therefore, a high number of individuals will benefit from this
by improving the competence of teachers candidates in this regard. Thus, it will be contributed to reach the priority targets
with the supporting strategy in teacher candidates