Am I Ableist?
Disability Awareness in Healthcare
Welcome
We are Canadian medical residents who, with the support of disability advocates nationwide, have authored and published an award-winning interactive e-book. This resource aims to educate healthcare trainees on essential knowledge about disabilities.
What is the Problem with Healthcare?
About 1 in 5 Canadians are currently disabled and most non-disabled people become disabled if they live long enough.
As students in healthcare, for many of us, our education about disability began before our training, with what we see in the media, how the people around us talk about disability, or even people we know with disabilities.
Whatever view of disability society showed us, clinical training usually focuses on clinical manifestations and lacks a social or societal perspective of various disabilities.
This means many clinicians may graduate not only misunderstanding disability, but could have harmful biases that could perpetuate inequities and negative health outcomes among disabled patients, with larger societal consequences.
Photo caption: Authors at the book launch, September 2023. From left: R Zachary Ford, Marihan Farid, and Abigale MacLellan (virtual, on the laptop).