March 3, 2021
Dr. Tammie Bassford, associate professor and Sonoran UCEDD faculty member, led a virtual training event with nearly 300 students from the University of Arizona health sciences to help them understand how to better care for people with disabilities.
Photo: Dr. Tammie Bassford led a training with UArizona health sciences students that focused on providing care for people with disabilities.
Seventeen people with disabilities from Special Olympics Arizona and the community joined Bassford to share their personal experiences with their own health care to show how the students can better respect and work with patients who have disabilities.
The students from the UArizona Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Public Health watched a pre-recorded scenario of an individual with a disability meet with healthcare professionals and a group home manager as they discussed her health care and wellbeing.
In small groups, the students were tasked with evaluating how the professionals facilitated an environment of universal communication, self-advocacy, self-determination, independence, and person-centeredness for the patient.
To help provide insight into the perspective of the patient, a member of the disability community joined the students. Paavlena Madhivanan was among the individuals who shared her healthcare insights with the students.
“I connected with Vicky (the patient in the video) because people in my life have talked to my parents and not me,” she says. “It’s not right to be put aside. Doctors should talk to me.”
Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health senior Bekkah Lerman participated in the training and is also an intern with the Center for Transformative Interprofessional Healthcare. She says every health care professional should participate in this kind of training.
“The training can only improve the community we work in and the scope of care we provide for our patients moving forward,” she says.
After graduation, Lerman says she will pursue a master’s degree in nursing and will fall back on what she learned during the training.
“A lot of times within healthcare we think we know everything,” Lerman says. “But after the event I was proven that we don’t know everything and there’s no need to go out of your way to make a patient with disabilities feel as though they are different.”
UArizona is among 18 other institutions across the country chosen by the National Curriculum Initiative in Developmental Medicine to improve the experiences of individuals with disabilities in health care settings and situations.
The Arizona Developmental Disabilities Network has developed a plain language document about the COVID-19 vaccine.
