Third-Year Medical Student, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Fourth-Year Medical Student, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
MedEdPORTAL. 2024 Apr 30;20:11396. doi: 10.15766/mep_2374-8265.11396. eCollection 2024.
People with disabilities and those with non-English language preferences have worse health outcomes than their counterparts due to barriers to communication and poor continuity of care. As members of both groups, people who are Deaf users of American Sign Language have compounded health disparities. Provider discomfort with these specific demographics is a contributing factor, often stemming from insufficient training in medical programs. To help address these health disparities, we created a session on disability, language, and communication for undergraduate medical students.
This 2-hour session was developed as a part of a 2020 curriculum shift for a total of 404 second-year medical student participants. We utilized a retrospective postsession survey to analyze learning objective achievement through a comparison of medians using the Wilcoxon signed rank test (α = .05) for the first 2 years of course implementation.
When assessing 158 students' self-perceived abilities to perform each of the learning objectives, students reported significantly higher confidence after the session compared to their retrospective presession confidence for all four learning objectives (s < .001, respectively). Responses signifying learning objective achievement (scores of 4, or 5, ), when averaged across the first 2 years of implementation, increased from 73% before the session to 98% after the session.
Our evaluation suggests medical students could benefit from increased educational initiatives on disability culture and health disparities caused by barriers to communication, to strengthen cultural humility, the delivery of health care, and, ultimately, health equity.
由于沟通障碍和医疗服务连续性差，残疾人和偏好非英语语言的人比他们的同龄人健康状况更差。作为这两个群体的成员，使用美国手语的聋人患者存在更严重的健康差距。医务人员对这些特定人群的不适应是一个促成因素，通常源于医疗项目培训不足。为了帮助解决这些健康差距，我们为本科医学生开设了一门关于残疾、语言和沟通的课程。
这个 2 小时的课程是 2020 年课程改革的一部分，共有 404 名二年级医学生参加。我们利用课程实施前两年的回顾性课后调查，通过使用 Wilcoxon 符号秩检验（α =.05）比较中位数来分析学习目标的实现情况。
在评估 158 名学生对执行每个学习目标的自我感知能力时，与课前回顾的自我感知能力相比，学生们在课后对所有四个学习目标的信心明显提高（s <.001，分别）。在课程实施的前两年中，标志着学习目标实现的（评分分别为 4 或 5 ）的回答比例从课程开始前的 73%增加到课程结束后的 98%。
我们的评估表明，医学生可能受益于增加残疾文化和沟通障碍导致的健康差距方面的教育计划，以增强文化谦逊、医疗保健的提供，并最终实现健康公平。
