Twelve tips for including disability education in undergraduate medical education.

Disability is a large and growing minority population worldwide. People with disabilities continue to experience health and healthcare disparities. Despite multiple calls to action to provide disability education within undergraduate medical education as a strategy to mitigate ongoing inequities, robust disability education is not routinely provided across medical schools. This article provides twelve tips that any medical school faculty can utilize to integrate meaningful disability education within existing core medical education.

Competency-Based Curriculum Development to Meet the Needs of People With Disabilities: A Call to Action.

People with disabilities constitute 22.2% of the population in the United States, and virtually all physicians have people with disabilities in their clinical practice across a wide range of diagnostic groups. However, studies demonstrate that people with disabilities are inadequately served by the health care system, leading to high costs and poor outcomes. The authors argue that one cause of this discrepancy is that medical students receive limited training in the care of people with disabilities and may therefore not be able to adequately meet the competencies that underlie the Core Entrustable Professional Activities for Entering Residency. To address these gaps, the authors present practical examples of integrating concepts of disability into the curriculum with minimal additional time requirements. A comprehensive disability curriculum is suggested to include active classroom learning, clinical, and community-based experiences. At institutions that do not have a comprehensive curriculum, the authors recommend adding disability-related knowledge and skill acquisition to existing curricula through modifications to current case-based learning, simulated patients, and objective structured clinical examinations. To facilitate curriculum development, they recommend that the World Health Organization International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health be used as a tool to build disability concepts into active learning. The goal of these recommended curricular changes is to enhance student performance in the clinical management of people with disabilities and to better train all future physicians in the care of this population.

Effects of a Brief Curricular Intervention on Medical Students' Attitudes Toward People with Disabilities in Healthcare Settings.

This study sought to evaluate the effects of a brief curricular intervention on medical students' attitudes toward physical disability in healthcare settings. Students participated in a focused curriculum about people with disabilities (PWDs), which included 2.5 hours of lectures, panel discussions, and video presentations. After the curricular sessions, students were surveyed (n = 237), and their attitudes toward PWDs in healthcare settings were compared with those of students who did not undergo the intervention (n = 251) using the Disability Attitudes in Health Care (DAHC) scale. Thematic analysis of the students' comments regarding the session was performed to supplement the DAHC scale. The intervention group responded with significantly more positive attitudes on 6 of the 17 items on the DAHC scale, and multiple linear regression analysis confirmed the independent effect of the curriculum on higher DAHC scale scores. Female students had more positive attitudes on the survey than did male students, although the effect of the curriculum was independent of gender. Previous experiences with PWDs did not correlate to higher attitude scores. These results suggest that a brief curricular intervention on disability can engender more positive attitudes in medical students toward PWDs.