Development of a Model to Integrate Disability Concepts in Nursing Education

Disability-related content and concepts are largely ignored in nursing education in the U.S., although studies have demonstrated that interactions of people with disabilities with members of the nursing staff are problematic at best. A group of nursing faculty from one school of nursing has taken on the challenge of developing, implementing and disseminating teaching strategies and materials to address this gap in nursing education locally and nationally. The purpose of this presentation is to describe the strategies that this group of faculty has developed and implemented to prepare undergraduate and graduate level nursing students to provide high quality nursing care to patients with disabilities. These strategies include but are not limited to the inclusion of standardized patients with disabilities in the undergraduate and nurse practitioner nursing curricula. The approaches and strategies used have been developed with the goal of making their use as a model by other schools of nursing and other health care disciplines possible. The successful effort to engage a major professional nursing organization in this effort will be described and the status of this effort will be presented.  The lessons learned and the challenges to integrating disability concepts in nursing curricula without disrupting existing curricula or adding additional time to an already packed curricula will be discussed.