Prevalence of Persons with Disability Enrolled in Undergraduate Medical Schools in Brazil, 2019

The affirmative policies in Brazil guarantee the provision of undergraduate medical education to People with Disability (PWD). The objective was to estimate the prevalence of PWD undergraduate medical students in Brazil in 2019.

This is an exploratory, descriptive study that used census data from the total population of the undergraduate medical students (N=183,646) who were enrolled at the Brazilian medical schools, in 2019. The data are secondary, unidentified and accessed online, and were originally collected by the Higher Education Census conducted by Anísio Teixeira National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (INEP), which used a questionnaire designed to capture information from students and medical courses. The descriptive analysis was based on absolute and relative frequencies.

The prevalence of medical students that were PWD was 0.80% (1,460/183,646), and this includes both Brazilian and foreign students. The latter includes people from 76 different countries. Foreign students who are PWD came from eight different countries: Bolivia, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Republic of Congo, Paraguay, Philippines, Singapore and Spain. Most of the PWD were male (51.37%), aged 20 to 24 years (46.78%) and of non-white ethnicity (52.26%). Most students were enrolled in public medical schools (73.97%). A fraction of PWD students (6.51%) was enrolled in medical schools with no specific resource or assistance for PWD. The highest prevalence was the physical disability (39.11%), followed by low vision accuracy (24.45%), intellectual (15.41%), low hearing (14.11%), blindness (3.97%), multiple disabilities (2.47%) and deafness (1.51%).

The prevalence of PWD medical students in Brazil is low, and is dominated by students with physical and sensory disabilities but lacks the deaf-blind. Despite the existence of legal regulations favoring PWD to study medicine, some medical schools have not done adequate adjustments to accommodate them. This suggests that affirmative policies for the inclusion of PWD in higher education, particularly in medicine, still need improvement.