Healthcare for Patients with Disabilities: Current Landscape, Innovations, and Opportunities

NCE 526 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

In this non-clinical elective course, students will advance their understanding of current and ongoing needs of patients with disabilities in the healthcare system and learn individual and systemic strategies for advancing healthcare for this population. The course will be comprised of a series of interactive workshops with experts in the fields of disability health, law, ethics, research, policy, medical education, and community engagement. Every session will include educators with disabilities who will articulate their lived experience of the topic at hand.  

Topics will be tied together across the course in three overarching themes driven by modern discourse on disability in medical education: patient experience, clinician experience, historic and systemic context. Emphasis will be on developing a foundational understanding of a range of disability topics, providing resources for ongoing learning, and tailoring learning to students’ individual current and future work as clinicians, educators, researchers, and policy makers.

Students will submit short reflections on a shared CANVAS-embedded blog following each class session and respond to/comment on at least one classmate’s reflections. Students will also complete a final project on a topic of their choice in an emerging area of disability health, law, ethics, research, policy, medical education, or community engagement. This project will involve a site visit and scholarship in a form appropriate to the topic (e.g. policy brief, manuscript, slidedeck). The course will provide a list of potential mentors for students to choose from or students can work with a different mentor of their choice, with course approval.

While no prior experience is necessary to enroll in this course, students are warmly invited to draw on any prior disability-related experience they may have had before or during medical school to inform in-class discussions, reflections, and final project. Relevant curricular experiences could include, but are not limited to, students’ learning in the longitudinal disability curriculum at HMS and caring for patients with disabilities during clinical clerkships.

This course aligns with national learning objectives in disability-competent care and HMS MD Program Competencies and Objectives.