She was speaking at a meeting of the full board of NHS Tayside in King’s Cross Hospital, Dundee, today.

The organisation was working with Capability Scotland, who had used disabled people to check services in shops. The term “mystery shopper” was the charitable organisation’s own term.

“What it essentially involves is disabled people themselves testing a service,” said Ms Pearson. “They have done that very successfully in relation to retail outlets. They will go in and just use a service and then feedback on their experience is shared with NHS Tayside. That forms how we take forward improvements to the service.”

In a more general paper to the board, titled Promoting Equality and Diversity, Ms Pearson noted one in seven of the population of Scotland had a disability but one in five people would be affected by disability at some point in their lives.

Changes to the Disability Discrimination Act that brought in new rights as of October said the NHS had a duty of “reasonable adjustment” to change policy practices and procedures to provide accessible and appropriate services.

Ms Pearson said it was not just about providing ramps for wheelchair access but also about things like providing access to interpreters for people with hearing impairments and a whole range of other issues.

Her paper stated that NHS Tayside was working with Capability Scotland on developing a “needs assessment” and getting the views of local disabled people on how they wanted to be involved in planning and designing health services.

She said around 1000 people would be surveyed regarding their experiences of the health service.

Her paper also outlined work going on to address other forms of discrimination including racial discrimination.

NHS Tayside’s human resources director Alan Boyter said, “Discrimination could be blatant and deliberate”, but that was not always the case. He explained that recently NHS Tayside had advertised a post requiring the successful individual could be “mobile”. An individual who was visually impaired applied for the post but was not short-listed because a visually impaired person would not have a driving licence.

Mr Boyter said the Royal National Institute for the Blind took his organisation to task because they did not consider how a visually impaired applicant could be helped to do the job or ask the individual applying how they would comply with the specification for the job.

“I don’t believe there was a deliberate intention to discriminate but the time honoured way in which we had done things (advertise vacant posts) cut across the changes in thinking about what is appropriate,” said Mr Boyter.