Reasonable Accommodations for Medical Faculty With Disabilities

Abstract

An unknown number of medical school faculty have disabilities, and their experiences have generally escaped notice and scrutiny. Although most medical schools offer long-term insurance and extended leaves of absence for disability, relatively few have policies explicitly addressing accommodations for faculty with disabilities as they perform teaching, research, and clinical duties. We discuss accommodating active medical school faculty with disabilities, drawing on University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine initiatives exploring the concerns of faculty with sensory and physical disabilities. Anecdotal reports suggest that many faculty, fearing reprisals, resist seeking job accommodations such as those mandated in the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Although some faculty with disabilities have found supportive academic mentors, others report that lax institutional enforcement of ADA requirements, including physical access problems, demonstrates a tepid commitment to disabled staff. Potentially useful job accommodations include adjusting timelines for promotion decisions; reassessing promotions requirements that inherently require extensive travel; improving physical access to teaching, research, and clinical sites; and modifying clinical and teaching schedules. Faculty with disabilities bring identical intellectual and collegial benefits to medical schools as their nondisabled counterparts. In addition, they may offer special insights into how chronic illness and impairments affect daily life.

An Exploration and Comparison of the Worklife Experiences of Registered Nurses and Physicians with Permanent Physical and/or Sensory Disabilities

“…Physicians seem to foster a culture of invincibility, so that admitting to having a disability may be seen as incongruent with being viewed as the ideal health care provider (Wainapel, ). The literature regarding physicians with disabilities has been largely anecdotal with some survey data (Allen & Devinsky, ; Anthony & Spalding, ; Currier, ; Lawn, ; Mercer, Dieppe & Chambers, ; Pone, ; Rabin, Rabin & Rabin, ; Steinberg, Iezzoni, Conill & Stineman, ; Stetten, ; Wainapel, ,b; Webster, ) and mostly includes descriptions of personal experiences by physicians with disabilities.…”

Variability in Women Faculty’s Preferences Regarding Mentor Similarity: A Multi-Institution Study in Academic Medicine

“…The work environment can be particularly complex for women faculty who struggle to balance professional and personal-life demands 9–11 and who are members of disenfranchised groups, such as racial-ethnic minorities 12 ; foreign-born individuals; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) 13,14 people; and/or persons with disabilities. 15 …”

‘Do no harm’? Professional regulation of disabled nursing students and nurses in Great Britain

“…This finds resonance in reports from the USA. Although the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act have been formidable tools for anti‐discrimination and affirmative action, tensions have been reported within the medical professions due to the ‘do no harm’ ethos that holds patient care sacrosanct (Steinberg et al. 2002).…”