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 People with disabilities are more likely to need health care services. The Americans with Disabilities Act has helped more people with disabilities receive that care by requiring health care providers to provide full and equal access for people with disabilities.
Despite great strides over the last 30 years, people with disabilities often still encounter health care providers who lack proper training on disabilities or rely on false stereotypes and assumptions about what it means to live with a disability that can negatively impact the quality of the care they provide. Many medical training programs still lack meaningful content on the broad range of disability experiences that could help medical professionals provide a higher quality of care.
The good news is that a large body of evidence suggests early and frequent experiences with people with disabilities can improve medical students’ knowledge and attitudes about disability, increasing their comfort level as they provide care. There is a growing effort to fill the disability training void in health training programs and to better prepare the health care workforce to meet the needs of individuals with disabilities.
For example, the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD) at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) developed competencies for public health and health care training curricula and programs that can be adopted into new or existing public health curricula and training programs.
The National Curriculum Initiative in Developmental Medicine (NCIDM), founded by AADMD, is partnering with 18 medical schools to integrate disability content into the medical school curriculum.
In May 2020, ACL announced a five-year project to expand access to quality health care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) by improving I/DD-specific knowledge, skills, attitudes, and competence of the health care workforce.The ADA has helped people with disabilities access care by addressing critical barriers such as facility accessibility, communication, and reasonable accommodations. These workforce and training initiatives build on that progress by improving the quality care people with disabilities receive.

                    *Last modified on 05/16/2023*
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