Talking About Disability Rights - An Interview with Andrea Dalzell, Disability Rights Influencer

Getting comfortable talking with patients or other healthcare professionals about disabilities can be challenging. It’s not something that is typically covered in school, and if you don’t have personal experience with the subject, you may find yourself floundering trying to find the right thing to say – or to avoid saying the wrong thing. And when you don’t feel comfortable, how can you expect your patient to feel comfortable?

It’s ironic, since any disability (whether physical, intellectual, sensory, acquired, or another form) essentially starts in a clinical setting. Disabilities become official when they are diagnosed by a clinician. It makes very little sense that those same clinicians may feel challenged to say the right thing when working with these patients, but that is the reality for many clinicians.

Words Matter, And We Have Room To Improve When It Comes To Thinking And Talking About Disability Rights In Healthcare 

We asked our Real World NP community their questions for working collaboratively with disabled patients. In this week’s episode, we got answers from Andrea Dalzell, Disability Rights Influencer to those questions and more.

•           What is person-first language, and why it is so important
•           Things that you may not have considered about accessibility
•           What workplace accommodations are – and are not
•           How to advocate for people with disabilities

The way that we, as clinicians, receive and interact with our patients with disabilities translates to how they (and their disability) are perceived in so many other aspects of their life. Working to develop an understanding, in a deep way, of how a patient’s disability impacts their overall life is a vital part of this. Likewise, improving understanding of how the language we use can positively or negatively impact patients, along with the ways that we interact with those same patients, is an important part of our roles as clinicians.  

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Accessibility Matters: Read Full Transcript Here