Doctors Given Anonymity Talk About Patients With Disabilities

One of the study authors found the responses 'shocking'
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 19, 2022 12:57 PM CDT
Doctors Given Anonymity Talk About Patients With Disabilities
   (Getty Images / Denis Kalinichenko)

They "don’t want to come across as horrible people," said Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, a professor of medicine at Harvard, in explaining part of her motivation for granting physicians anonymity as part of her latest study. It's a fair point. The doctors were being asked about how they reacted to patients with disabilities, and study co-author Dr. Tara Lagu characterized their responses as "shocking" when speaking to the New York Times. Working from the position that "people with disabilities face barriers when attempting to gain access to health care settings," the researchers used three physician focus groups to zero in on "physical, communication, knowledge, structural, and attitudinal barriers to care for people with disabilities," per their study published earlier this month in Health Affairs.

The study identifies a number of frustrations the doctors voiced, from the expense of accommodating patients with disabilities to 15-minute appointment slots being inadequate for giving them high-quality care. One specialist said the combination of time constraints and patients with disabilities produced "a disruption to clinic flow." When asked how they would handle a wheelchair user who could not exit the chair to have their weight taken, physicians recounted sending patients to "a supermarket, grain elevator, zoo, or cattle processing plant to obtain a weight," per the study. In some cases, doctors used outdated terminology (ie, "mentally retarded"); another described people with disabilities as "an entitled population."

The researchers also noted that when asked about the Americans with Disabilities Act, "nearly all of the physicians reported having little or no training on the law and its implications for their practices. ... In general, attitudes about the ADA were apathetic and even adversarial." An "explicit bias toward people with disabilities" was apparently among many of the physicians, some of whom shared strategies for discharging them from their practices, the study states. Though Lagu was apparently shocked by her findings, News Medical notes it's just her latest research on the topic: In a 2012 study she tried to schedule an appointment for a fictional patient in a wheelchair; only 22% of the 256 practices she reached out to said they could accommodate the patient. (More discoveries stories.)

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