Intersecting disability and race implicit attitudes of health care professionals

Focusing on intersectionality is necessary not only to better understand how oppression impacts people, but also to reduce the harmful impacts of discrimination. While past research has separately found most health care professionals are implicitly (unconsciously) biased against disability, and implicitly biased against people of color, and some also self-report explicit (conscious) biases, to our knowledge, there is little to no research about health care professionals' intersectional attitudes. Yet, we do know that health care professionals' attitudes and biases impact the quality of care they provide and the outcomes of those they serve. Thus, it is critical to uncover more information about their explicit and implicit attitudes, especially intersectional attitudes.

The aim of this study was to examine the intersecting disability and race attitudes of health care professionals.

We had 784 health care professionals complete the Intersecting Disability and Race Attitudes Implicit Association Test (IDRA-IAT) and an explicit measure (January-March 2025).

Health care professionals implicitly preferred nondisabled white people (M = 0.18) the most, then disabled white people (M = 0.08), and then disabled (M = -0.12) and nondisabled people of color (M = -0.14) the least. There was a significant gap between participants' explicit and implicit attitudes, with self-report explicit attitudes showing an opposite pattern as implicit attitudes, suggesting health care professionals may be unaware of the scope of their implicit biases.

Everyone deserves high quality healthcare; until we reduce health care professionals' biases, health equity will not be possible.