A new National Institutes of Health program will support studies to understand how ableism—discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities—contributes to health disparities. The effort, funded by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Eye Institute, and Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, will also support research on how to counter the negative health effects of ableism.
People with disabilities often experience inaccessible medical offices and equipment, biased medical decision-making, limited services, less aggressive treatment, and refusal of certain types of care. The new NIH program will fund 10 projects, totaling nearly $30 million over 5 years, to examine the potential impact of ableism on pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum outcomes among Medicaid patients with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs), to help people with low vision access services and navigate barriers in the health care system, and to develop interventions to identify and overcome ableist beliefs and practices among caregivers, educators, and healthcare providers who care for children who are blind or visually impaired.
Other projects will seek to identify and reduce the effects of diagnostic overshadowing—the attribution of symptoms to disability rather than to a new medical condition, to investigate how ableism affects health outcomes in people with mobility disabilities, and to develop an online education program for obstetricians to help them avoid ableism and meet the health care needs of disabled pregnant people.
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