The Dearth of Disability Medical Education and a Partial Solution.

Issue: While over one-quarter of adult Americans have a disability, there is a paucity of disability-specific curricula in American medical schools and residency programs. Potential consequences of this educational dearth include persistent inaccessibility of health care facilities and delivery of inequitable health care to individuals with disabilities. Evidence: Several working groups have proposed disability-specific competencies for health professions education and means by which to integrate them into existing curricula. A limited number of medical schools and residency programs have formally introduced disability-specific materials into their curricula. To our knowledge, however, there are no generalist (internal medicine or family medicine) residency programs that offer specialized training in the clinical care of people with disabilities. Implications: Offering generalist physicians the opportunity to acquire the clinical and cognitive skills required to provide thorough and equitable health care to people with disabilities is critically important. There are too few physiatrists to see to their care needs. In this manuscript, we present a novel concentration in an Internal Medicine residency program in the care of individuals with a variety of disabilities. Our hope is that this work will initiate discussions among educational leaders about how to address the lack of graduate medical education-level training in disability care. We also hope it will afford program directors the opportunity to implement similar concentrations and tracks and will eventually produce a generation of generalists who are well-equipped to help care for people with disabilities.