Attitudinal barriers

Attitudinal barriers

One of the reasons why disabled medical students and doctors have failed to gain complete access to their environments is attitudinal barriers. These attitudinal barriers either fall under the presumption that doctors cannot be disabled or that if they are asking for accommodations, they are taking advantage of services they do not actually need. This can be seen in the following interviews conducted with disabled doctors:

I think attitudinal for me is always the hardest [barrier] to overcome, because it’s the one that you have the least control over, if that makes sense. You can’t really control other people’s unconscious bias.... It’s not just the people running the school. It’s patients. It’s nurses. I had a lot of that. I had a nurse in the emergency room be like, “Why are you playing in that wheelchair?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” She was like, “Whose wheelchair did you take?” and I was like, “It’s mine.” She was like, “But you’re a doctor,” and I was like, “Yes. Yes, and you’re a nurse.” To have a nurse still have that attitude is very frustrating. — Student discussing unconscious bias among colleagues in the clinic (Meeks & Jain, 2018)

Talking about disabled physician Diana Cejas, Wendy Lu of Huffpost says:

When she asked for dictation software to help her with note-taking, which she often spent hours into the night catching up on, an administrator brushed her off and told her she just needed to work harder. She learned that some of her colleagues — even those who knew what she’d just gone through — were gossiping behind her back and assumed that she just wanted special treatment, even when she had to leave work to get follow-up scans and bloodwork. (Lu, 2021)

Wendy Lu, Lisa Meeks, Neera Jain

Lu, W. (2021, July 22). Disabled Doctors Were Called Too ‘Weak’ To Be In Medicine. It’s Hurting The Entire System. From Huffpost: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disabled-doctors-medicine-ableism_n_60f86967e4b0ca689fa560dc

Meeks, L., & Jain, N. (2018). Accessibility, Inclusion and Action in Medical Education: Lived Experiences of Learners and Physicians With Disabilities . Association of American Medical Colleges.