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Call from the Canadian Association of Physicians With Disabilities for Committee Members to Co-Develop Curriculum on Disability for Medical Students

My name is Kirsten Hall and I am a disabled medical student/resident working with the Canadian Association of Physicians with Disabilities. We are an advocacy group currently working to develop modules to improve disability education for medical students. Currently, this is taught by primarily able-bodied physicians, is not uniformly taught across the country and with little to no input from people with lived disability experience. We know that people with disabilities experience ableism in receiving care, often leading to worse healthcare outcomes.

We are working to address this by co-creating a national curriculum about disability with disability community partners the Council of Canadians With Disabilities (CCD) and the National Educational Association of Disabled Students (NEADS) and ourselves (a group of disabled medical trainees). There will be 6 online modules: Module 1: Primer on Disability and Ableism, Module 2: Primer on Disability Health Policy in Canada, Module 3: Disability Rights, Justice and Intersectionality, Module 4: History and Physical Exam Pearls for Persons With Disabilities, Module 5: Childhood onset disability/growing up with disability and Module 6: Ableism in medicine and being an effective ally. We are reaching out to gauge your interest in co-creating module 3 or 4. The module will consist of a pre and post test of medical students’ knowledge on the module topic, a presentation (likely powerpoint/video), a case example, and a resource section. We anticipate the time commitment being approximately 1-2 hours per month in the creation phase of the project.

Right now we have a very small amount of Canadian Federation of Medical Students (CFMS) funding over a 2 year period. The funding is being allocated to funding community partners, technical support/hosting, translation and captioning. For transparency as trainees we are not allowed to accept any of this funding, so we are working on this project without compensation. Should we receive any additional funding (currently being explored), our commitment is to appropriately compensating our community partners. However, at this time we are only able to offer $100 for your work. You would be authors and co-creators of this work (if you would like) and will be acknowledged as such in the modules and in any future work done around these modules. If you are interested in supporting the development of this curriculum with us and/or have questions please reply to me at Kirsten.hall25@gmail.com