Disability Awareness Training in Health Care Education
Christine Murphy, MD, Alina Bennett, MA; John McKee, PhD; Era Buck, PhD; Brandon Hernandez, MLA; Susan Gerik, MD
Department of Pediatrics
The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas
Background
Methods
Health care providers of all professions
have roles in caring for persons with
disabilities.
Students were recruited to attend either the didactic-only control or interactive case-based intervention
group, and randomly assigned.
Current curricula for and attitudes of
students in various professional training
programs even within a single institution
vary considerably.
Pre- and immediate post-educational surveys were administered and collected anonymously using
matched samples. Data was analyzed using Chi-squared tests and McNemar’s test on paired proportions.
Attitudes toward disabilities held by
health care providers can represent
significant barriers to medical care and
treatment.
The purpose of this research is to
examine if an interactive workshop
improved knowledge and comfort
among students better than a didactic
approach.
Aim
Because education modalities differ
among programs, we suspected that
knowledge and comfort with disability
care does as well. We hypothesized
that an interactive workshop would be
most effective. Both modalities were
given to four groups of volunteers. Preand post-tests were administered. The
interactive approach produced a greater
gain of knowledge than did the didacticonly method. It also improved selfreported comfort levels, despite
baseline differences in groups. These
findings suggest that disability
awareness training is most effective in
an interactive manner.
Results
Discussion
Groups were self-selected and
contained a different majority of health
care students. Medical student
enrollment was limited, and may be due
to poor insight into their lack of
education.
Preconceptions changed minimally
overall. The controls reported more
education initially. Afterwards, the
difference persisted. Comfort scores
were higher for controls, except for
interviewing, and perhaps education
produced doubt about existing
knowledge. Comfort regarding common
conditions also lost significance after
intervention, with improvement in both
groups and greater in the intervention.
Knowledge improved for both groups,
but greater gains were achieved in the
intervention group. Overall difference in
mean for content percentage correct
was about 12% greater in the interactive
(experimental) group than in the control.
Conclusion
The results suggest that an interactive
approach to teaching disability
awareness is a more effective method of
education than didactics alone.
Special Thanks