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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Suzanne McDermott, PhD and Catherine Leigh Graham, MEBME. Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of South Carolina, School of Medicine, 3209 Colonial Drive, Columbia, SC 29203, 803-434-2445, suzanne.mcdermott@palmettohealth.org

Purpose: Medical students learn content about disability prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation throughout their didactic medical education. However, their experience modifying primary care to meet the needs of patients with permanent disabilities is usually subject to the presence of a patient with a disability and the knowledge of the attending physician, during their clerkship rotations. We will describe a special initiative that formalized the instruction about care of patients with disabilities during the third year family medicine eight week clerkship.

Methods: The standardized patient pool was enlarged to include actors with spinal cord injury (both paraplegia and quadriplegia) and actors with mental retardation. These actors were trained to learn the clinical scenarios, alongside actors without disabilities.

An attitude survey is completed at the onset of the rotation, followed by didactic instruction, and clinical exposure. The final examination includes standardized patients presenting common clinical complaints to grade the student's performance. The attitude survey is then re-administered at the end of the clerkship.

Results and Conclusions: Results about evaluation of performance of medical students and change in their attitudes will be presented. Implications for expanding the actor pool to include patients with other disabilities will be discussed. Finally, the presenter will discuss the feedback we have received from the actors, students and faculty.

Learning Objectives: