Disability competencies in the licensure examinations of health professions

Disability-centric curricula in the education of health providers are often limited and highly variable across programs. It is unclear whether disability-centric content is tested in the licensure exams of health professions.

To evaluate the congruency of the licensure exams of eight health professions with the Core Competencies on Disability for Health Care Education.

We performed a cross-sectional analysis of publicly available official exam content outlines via key word search and manual mapping to identify the presence of Core Competencies.

The median number of Core Competencies addressed by the content outlines was three (range 1-4). The most common Core Competency was Competency 2 (professionalism and patient-centered care; 8/8 exams), often in the context of using interpretive services or accessible forms of communication. No content outline addressed Competency 4 (teams and systems-based care), and only one addressed Competency 3 (legal obligations). The exams for physical therapy, occupational therapy, and clinical social work addressed the most competencies (4/6); the exam for physician assistants addressed the fewest (1/6). The median number of uses of the words "disabilit (y/ies)" and "disabl (ed/ing)" within content outlines was 1.5 (range: 0-11), with two outlines lacking any uses.

On average, health professions licensure exams, as proxied by their content outlines, addressed only half of the Core Competencies on Disability and often in a limited, specific manner. With the high and increasing prevalence of disability among American adults, health professions should strive to educate and assess their students using a disability-competent curriculum.