"It is estimated that almost 13 percent of the total U.S. population has a disability. Nearly 11 percent of adults ages 18 to 64, and 35 percent of adults age 65 or older, have a disability. [...] Accessibility of health care clinics, hospitals and other facilities in which patients receive care by a health care professional is essential to ensuring people have the ability to obtain the care they need when they need it."

"This article explains barriers faced by disabled people in obtaining access to healthcare, including lifesaving treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ableism can affect quality of life determinations and result in discriminatory behavior, unfairly costing disabled lives. Psychologists are positioned to advocate for social justice alongside the disability community by including disability in research, promoting meaningful inclusion in training and education, and leveraging roles in health care practice and leadership."

"Individuals living with disabilities are underrepresented in the physician workforce, despite benefits of inclusion. This article describes how both ableism in admissions processes and expectations set by technical standards can perpetuate harm. The authors advocate for active attention to disability diversity and equity in medical school admissions."

"The report lays out the ways structures, culture, and climate—both in institutions and academic medicine writ large—generate barriers and supports to education. Barriers that follow from certain structural arrangements include:
• Uninformed disability service providers
• Lack of clear policies and procedures
• Lack of access to knowledge about nuanced clinical accommodations and assistive technology
• Lack of access to other meaningful accommodations
• Failure to publicize technical standards and to provide information on accessing accommodations"

"Nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population has a disability, and many of these Americans experience disparities in the health care they receive. In part, these health care disparities result from a lack of understanding about disability by health care providers. The education of physicians is grounded in a biomedical model that emphasizes pathology, impairment, or dysfunction, rather than a social model of disability that focuses on removing barriers for individuals with disabilities and improving their capabilities. [...] At present, medical students and residents with disabilities face structural barriers related to policies and procedures, clinical accommodations, disability and wellness support services, and the physical environment."

"The historical relationship between health care professionals and people with disabilities is fraught, a fact all the more troubling in light of the distinctive roles clinicians play in both establishing and responding to that which is considered normal or abnormal by society at large. Those who wish to improve their clinical practice might struggle, however, to keep up with developments across numerous disability communities as well as the ever-growing body of disability studies scholarship. To assist with this goal, I offer an overview of recent disability theory, outline a set of responsibilities clinicians have to disability communities, and provide recommendations for clinicians who hope to justly treat patients with disabilities and improve their care and health outcomes."

"The term “ableism” can be defined as practices or policies that treat people with disabilities as if they were invisible, disposable and less than human, while taking for granted able-bodiedness as humanity’s default state.1 Ableism is a force I have had to negotiate and resist all my life, even though I wasn’t fully aware of it as a form of oppression until I entered a PhD program in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University at age 39. There, I completed a dissertation on the representations of somatic pain within settler- and Indigenous-authored fictional texts.2 Guiding my thinking while I wrote the dissertation was not only an archive of biomedical sources that included Ronald Melzack,3 a name I knew from my training as a medical doctor almost 2 decades earlier, but also giants in the field of disability studies like Lennard Davis,4 Petra Kuppers5 and Tobin Seibers.6 After investing in this new learning, I capitalized on a lifetime of exclusion and derision and became politically active seemingly overnight, engaging in a host of activities designed to promote and assist the fates of my people, the mentally ill."

"Medicine has traditionally been viewed as a benevolent discipline in which every human life is valued equally, without any form of prejudice or discrimination. Although this may remain the ideal to which medicine aspires, the reality is that, as individuals, medical professionals are not immune to the influence of dominant societal understandings of, and attitudes toward, individuals and groups of people deemed to be “others.”

Galli and colleagues observe that “[d]espite their intentions, personal goals and normative expectations, even health professionals are unconscious bearers of implicit social biases that affect the quality of professional interventions.”1 They further contend that “[i]mmediately, and from early life and thereafter, people perceive individuals with disability as ‘vulnerable’ and of low competence, and, accordingly, treat members of this group differently.”1 Consequently, people with disabilities often continue to experience social devaluation on account of their disabilities (i.e., ableism), despite the fact that the last few decades have seen an increased awareness and a decreased social acceptability of discrimination based on other characteristics such as race (i.e., racism) and gender (i.e., sexism). People with disabilities thus remain subjected to ableist attitudes in many sectors, including — often especially — the health care system."

"There currently exists an exciting impetus for increased diversity among medical trainees and improved equity in medical care received by patients. Yet, inclusion of disability within these efforts is often forgotten, allowing the current cultural narrative of ableism to shape medical training. National structural challenges as early as medical school admissions and ableist barriers throughout the educational pipeline have yielded 1) a concerningly low prevalence of medical students and physicians in the US who identify as disabled and 2) propagation of systemic misunderstandings on disability in our healthcare system. This perspective addresses the need for a re-evaluation of diversity in medicine which includes ability status and a commitment to anti-ableism as a critical part of the conversation. We propose reforms and important considerations that could have meaningful implications necessary for improving the culture of disability inclusion in medical education."

"Individuals living with disabilities are underrepresented in the physician workforce, despite the known benefits of disability inclusion. As noted by former American Medical Association (AMA) president, Barbara McAneny:

“One requirement to advance health equity is to promote greater diversity among medical school applicants and enrollees.”

Yet both ableism in medical schools' admissions processes and expectations set by technical standards for the physician workforce can perpetuate historical patterns of exclusion in health care settings, as argued in this recent article in the AMA Journal of Ethics. Patients with disabilities receive substandard health care and have unequal access to health care services and barriers for persons with disabilities to enter the medical profession will undermine commendable disability awareness efforts for clinicians."

"As we approach 30 years since the passage of the ADA in 1990, the absence of a clear federal rule in this area raises questions about how to improve access to medical diagnostic equipment for millions of Americans with disability, many of whom face considerable difficulty getting care because of inaccessible equipment in public and private health care settings."

"Mobility disability is the most common disability among adult Americans, estimated at 13.7% of the US population. Cancer prevalence is higher among people with mobility disability compared with the general population, yet people with disability experience disparities in cancer screening and treatment."

"Some provisions of the Affordable Care Act should extend the advances made by the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990. But the persistence of health disparities and barriers to care for people with disabilities indicates that more remains to be done."

"Concerns coalesced around 4 broad categories: communication experiences with people who are deaf or hard of hearing, communication with people who are blind or have vision impairment, communication with people who have intellectual disability, and recommendations for improving communication."