A community-centered disability curriculum for medical students

Although disabilities are prevalent, many medical professionals lack knowledge about them. Many haven't been trained to care for patients who have them and have negative attitudes about disabilities and those who have them. Their attitudes can affect health care and patient outcomes. Despite recommendations by U.S. surgeons general to include disability curricula in medical education, only a small minority of medical schools have done so. In 2011, Mayo Medical School developed a new disability curriculum for its first-year students. The aim was that they might gain insight into their potential biases and understand how those biases could affect the care they provide to persons with disabilities. Here we describe Mayo Medical School's experience with its disability-awareness curriculum.