Why Having More Disabled Doctors Matters for Patient Care

When Lisa Meeks, PhDbegan researching the prevalence of disabled doctors, she began with a bare foundation.

“I began in 2015, just proving that folks with disabilities existed. That was the primary threshold I felt like I needed to go through to even have this develop into established,” said Meeks, an associate professor of family medicine and learning health sciences on the University of Michigan.

One of her earlier studies, published in JAMA in 2016, found 2.7% of medical students identified as having a disability.

That number seems to have grown. In a recent study by Meeks and other researchers on the Docs with Disabilities Initiative5.9% of physicians applying for residency in 2022 and 2023 reported disability.

However, the rates at which disabled graduating medical student applicants match with their preferred residency vary significantly by specialty. The residency match is a key step in furthering medical education after medical school. While specialties like pediatrics and internal medicine saw the next match rate amongst disabled applicants than their non-disabled peers, other areas lagged behind.

“It was not particularly surprising, but alarming indeed, to have your suspicions confirmed that the gap, the inequity for applicants with disability is most pronounced amongst general surgery and surgical subspecialties, including orthopedic surgery, with a match rate of below 60%, which could be very, very low,” said Mytien Nguyen, MSca coauthor of the study and an MD-PhD candidate at Yale School of Medicine.

Persistent Biases Against Disabled Doctors

Overall, although disabled applicants represent lower than 6% of the applicant pool, many had match rates comparable to their peers. But disabled people often don’t self-disclose on workplace and employment documentation. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around 13% of Americans are disabled. Of this group, only 37.1% of those aged 16–64 are employed.

While reliable data on the rates of revealing an individual’s disability status within the workplace could be hard to come back by, research from the non-profit Disability:In suggests that the speed of disclosure worldwide is low due to workplace biases.

In the eyes of Meeks and her colleagues, those self same stigmas persist within the medical field.

Meeks said this bias is commonly directed at those with psychiatric disabilities, with the prevailing perception being that doctors with mental health disabilities couldn’t or shouldn’t have the option to do their jobs.

“If we were truly to lean into that concept, 40% of our workforce would must go away,” Meeks said. “In many cases, it’s driven by the home of drugs…I believe now we have numerous individuals who are available non-disabled and develop into disabled with a mental health disability because of this of their training experiences.”

In some ways, biases against disabled doctors mirror the challenges faced by patients with disabilities. A 2021 study published in Health Affairs found that 56.5% of physicians surveyed had a powerful feeling that they might welcome disabled patients into their practice. More than 80% of those self same respondents said they thought disabled people have a lower quality of life.

However, only 3.5% of the surveyed physicians—or 25 out of 714—have disability accommodations at work.

Addressing Stigma in Medical Training

Meeks said obstetrics and gynecology is a specialty where she believes the presence of disabled doctors can shift the bias disabled patients face. She described the training environment and the residency matching process on this field as “unforgiving.” Both Meeks and Nguyen expected the gap to be much larger than it was.

Around 25% of the present research on health disparities amongst individuals with disabilities is targeted on women, based on Meeks. This focus highlights the persistent biases that disabled women face.

A recent systematic review identified a big selection of reasons disabled women struggle to receive adequate medical care, including cost, healthcare providers’ lack of expertise, and insufficient accommodations.

“If we are able to bring more physicians with disabilities into OBGYN, there’s a pathway to practice that’s direct to reducing these perceptions of what it means to be disabled,” she said.

Another further area for exploration is whether or not disabled doctors are, implicitly or explicitly, being pushed towards certain specialties, based on Nguyen.

“I wonder if there’s a big drop off from matriculation and what students originally desired to go into,” Nguyen said. “Because oftentimes advice during medical school, either counseling or subconscious or hidden curriculum, often deter students from specific specialty due to the prospect of matching.”

Despite all of the negativity that tends to stem from research into disability representation within the medical workforce, Meeks said the small increase within the variety of doctors with disabilities offers a glimmer of hope. She and her colleagues consider this data can assist dismantle the misperception amongst residency program administrators that they’ve far fewer disabled matches than they really do.

“[This] data could be used to disrupt the assumptions that some people in those professions may make about who’s amongst them of their training programs,” Meeks said.