Advancing Disability-Inclusive Healthcare

It is no secret that healthcare has not served the needs of people with disabilities well. Despite repeated calls to teach healthcare professionals a comprehensive model of holistic care, centering the perspectives of people with disabilities, little has changed. Why? We believe many healthcare training programs do recognize and desire to change but simply do not have the curricular tools and resources. We hope that this website helps to close this gap.

The guiding principles we have used in building the curricula are:

1. Grounding disability in a holistic biopsychosocial model.
2. Centering the perspectives of people with disabilities as the experts in their conditions.
3. Adopting inclusive and universal learning strategies.
4. Integrating high-quality materials that have been developed by others.

© 2025 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.

To address the dearth of clinical services, Dr. Caskey committed to becoming the home for a complex primary care clinic at UI-Health in the Division of Academic Medicine.  She hired Erin Hickey, MD, a new Med-Peds graduate in 2020, as medical director and member of the ADIH steering committee. This team built the LDC model of care and interprofessional team. By March of 2024, with a renovated, fully accessible clinic, the Lifespan Disability Clinic (LDC) was formally launched.

The LDC offers the following services:

• Disability-inclusive Primary Care
• Coordination of medical and social care
• Management of medical supplies
• Mobility Equipment and Services
• Assistance with coordinating Transportation Services
• Referral to accessible dentistry
• Accessible clinic space
• Accessible and free parking
• Behavioral Health (with telehealth option)
• Physical and Occupational Therapy at 55th and Pulaski
• Coordination with subspecialty care (i.e., Genetics, Wound Care, Pulmonology)
• Laboratory and radiology services
• Bilingual staff (Spanish)

To address the lack of healthcare professional training, the ADIH steering committee was well-positioned in 2023 to apply for the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) grant, Primary Care Training & Enhancement – Language & Disability Access.

We were fortunate to be awarded support from HRSA for our project, Working to right a wrong: Training medical students to care for people with physical, intellectual and developmental disabilities (E. Hickey – Principal Investigator). As of October 2025, the award provided 100% of the total costs and totaled $2,000,000. The content are those of the authors. They may not reflect the policies of HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government.

Though the HRSA grant was focused on intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities and the training of medical students, we have attempted to shape the curricula for use by all health professional learners. We will be adding new curriculum.

HRSA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; their programs provide health care to people who are geographically isolated and economically or medically vulnerable. HRSA programs also support health infrastructure through training of health professionals.

To learn more about the HRSA team, click here.

The curriculum is flexible and includes modules on a variety of core topics as well as supplemental modules and individual healthcare stories of people who live with disabilities. One component of the curriculum includes an elective offered by LDC Primary Care Physicians to 4th year University of Illinois College of Medicine students called Disability Medicine.

At the conclusion of the course students will be able to:

1. Provide patient-centered and disability-inclusive care to patients with a wide
   range of disabilities.
2. Acquire a conceptual framework of disability in the context of human diversity, the lifespan, wellness, injury and social and cultural environments.
3.  Explore and mitigate one’s own implicit biases and avoid making assumptions
   about a person’s abilities or lack of abilities and lifestyle.
4. Understand and identify legal requirements for providing health care in a manner
   that is, at minimum, consistent with federal laws such as the Americans with
   Disabilities Act (ADA), Rehabilitation Act, and Social Security Act to meet the
   individual needs of people with disabilities.
5. Engage and collaborate with team members within and outside their own discipline to provide high quality, interprofessional team-based health care to people with disabilities.
6. Collect and interpret relevant information about the health and function of patients with disabilities to engage patients in creating a plan of care that includes essential and optimal services and supports.

• Examples of Specialty Clinic Sites*/Community Immersion Sites**

The modules are open-access, can be self-paced, and include interactive learning components. They can be done in any order or as stand alone modules.

For those looking for a basic introductory overview, you might consider Understanding Disability: Language, Identity, Culture & Models.

For a more in-depth approach, we recommend the following foundational module:

• Introduction to Disability
• A Short History of Disability Rights in the U.S.
• Legal Responsibilities of Healthcare Providers
• Michael’s Story
• Communicating with Patients with Disabilities
• Health Insurance & Other Services

People with disabilities live lives as diverse as those without disabilities, yet clinicians rarely know much about the fullness of these lives. Clinicians have contact bias (seeing them only in healthcare settings when they are often sick and in need of care) and tend to focus their attention on medical diagnoses. In a society in which ableism is endemic, cultural images and stories perpetuate bias and misinformation, and clinicians receive little to no education about disability, this is a recipe for poor care. They also miss the many people with disabilities who may also be living and working side by side with you in healthcare.

We believe to mitigate these stereotypes and misinformation, we need counter-narratives, or stories about the full lives of people with disabilities that are told in partnership with them. The stories included here profile people with many disability types and health conditions, who come from diverse backgrounds and embody intersectional identities. They profile activities that give learners a window into the person’s  “typical day” and often provide an intimate view of their home, school,  and recreational and work environments. Some will include the voices of the person’s care partners and support systems.

We invite our learners to think of these stories not as patient stories, but simply as stories of people you may encounter in healthcare settings who happen to have disabilities. For educators who wish to use these stories in discussions or trainings we offer suggested uses and reflective questions that can be used for discussion.

We have three categories of stories: Snapshots of Community members, Leaders in the Disability Rights Movement, and Health Professionals with Disabilities.

• Featured Stories