Shared Decision-Making at the Intersection of Disability, Culture, and Language Accessibility: An Educational Session for Medical Students

Abstract

Introduction People with disabilities and those with non-English language preferences have worse health outcomes than their counterparts due to barriers to communication and poor continuity of care. As members of both groups, people who are Deaf users of American Sign Language have compounded health disparities. Provider discomfort with these specific demographics is a contributing factor, often stemming from insufficient training in medical programs. To help address these health disparities, we created a session on disability, language, and communication for undergraduate medical students. Methods This 2-hour session was developed as a part of a 2020 curriculum shift for a total of 404 second-year medical student participants. We utilized a retrospective postsession survey to analyze learning objective achievement through a comparison of medians using the Wilcoxon signed rank test (α = .05) for the first 2 years of course implementation. Results When assessing 158 students’ self-perceived abilities to perform each of the learning objectives, students reported significantly higher confidence after the session compared to their retrospective presession confidence for all four learning objectives ( p s < .001, respectively). Responses signifying learning objective achievement (scores of 4, probably yes, or 5, definitely yes ), when averaged across the first 2 years of implementation, increased from 73% before the session to 98% after the session. Discussion Our evaluation suggests medical students could benefit from increased educational initiatives on disability culture and health disparities caused by barriers to communication, to strengthen cultural humility, the delivery of health care, and, ultimately, health equity.