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

chronic care interviews mindset np student real world topics Nov 01, 2022

An image of two women smiling in a dark blue background with a text Talking About Disability Rights An Interview with Andrea Dalzell

⭐️ CME Opportunity for this video below ⭐️

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.

(FYI: to slow down or speed up the audio, hit the gear symbol in the bottom right corner and change it to 0.5x (slower) or 1.5x (faster). Closed captions are also located at the bottom R corner of the video.)

🎉 CME opportunity available for this video!

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1. Click on this CME link: https://earnc.me/viy4Sb Sign up for $10 for this video episode.

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