Disability in the Undergraduate Healthcare Curriculum

Alice Barber supervised by Tom Campbell, Miro Griffiths

About the student researcher

I'm Alice and I am a fourth year medical student. I am really pleased to have been able to get involved in research looking at how disability is taught to medical students, and to have had the opportunity to learn from academics within disability studies whilst on my placement. As a medical student with hearing loss, I am passionate about reframing the way that disability has historically been taught to medical and other healthcare students, in order to improve not only the provision of healthcare for disabled people, but also to better the experiences of disabled healthcare professionals.

Project overview

The aim of the project was to look at how disability is currently being taught to healthcare students, and then to look at ways forward in how disability could be taught differently to healthcare students. The project aimed to explore the experiences and perspectives of disabled healthcare students on how disability had been taught to them in their healthcare curriculums, through the use of focus groups. Due to lack of interest from potential participants, we were unable to run the focus groups over the summer, however plan to hopefully run these for a different project at a later date. We instead produced a literature review and report exploring the current knowledge on how disability is taught to healthcare students, and assimilating the suggestions for ways that it could be taught in the future to improve the care that disabled people receive.