Why Having More Disabled Doctors Matters for Patient Care

When Lisa Meeks, PhD, started researching the prevalence of disabled doctors, she started with a bare foundation.

“I started in 2015, just proving that people with disabilities existed. That was the first threshold I felt like I needed to pass through to even have this become established,” said Meeks, an associate professor of family medicine and learning health sciences at the University of Michigan.

One of her earlier studies, published in JAMA in 2016, found 2.7% of medical students identified as having a disability.

That number seems to have grown. In a recent study by Meeks and other researchers at the Docs with Disabilities Initiative, 5.9% of physicians applying for residency in 2022 and 2023 reported disability.

However, the rates at which disabled graduating medical student applicants match with their preferred residency vary significantly by specialty. The residency match is a key step in furthering medical education after medical school. While specialties like pediatrics and internal medicine saw a higher match rate among disabled applicants than their non-disabled peers, other areas lagged behind.

“It was not particularly surprising, but alarming indeed, to have your suspicions confirmed that the gap, the inequity for applicants with disability is most pronounced among general surgery and surgical subspecialties, including orthopedic surgery, with a match rate of below 60%, which is very, very low,” said Mytien Nguyen, MSc, a coauthor of the study and an MD-PhD candidate at Yale School of Medicine. 

Persistent Biases Against Disabled Doctors

Overall, although disabled applicants represent less than 6% of the applicant pool, many had match rates comparable to their peers. But disabled people often don’t self-disclose on workplace and employment documentation. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around 13% of Americans are disabled. Of this group, only 37.1% of those aged 16–64 are employed. 

While reliable data on the rates of disclosing a person’s disability status in the workplace can be hard to come by, research from the non-profit Disability:In suggests that the rate of disclosure worldwide is low because of workplace biases. 

In the eyes of Meeks and her colleagues, those same stigmas persist in the medical field. 

Meeks said this bias is often directed at those with psychiatric disabilities, with the prevailing perception being that doctors with mental health disabilities couldn’t or shouldn’t be able to do their jobs.

“If we were truly to lean into that idea, 40% of our workforce would have to go away,” Meeks said. “In many cases, it’s driven by the house of medicine…I think we have lots of people who come in non-disabled and become disabled with a mental health disability as a result of their training experiences.”

In many ways, biases against disabled doctors mirror the challenges faced by patients with disabilities. A 2021 study published in Health Affairs found that 56.5% of physicians surveyed had a strong feeling that they would welcome disabled patients into their practice. More than 80% of those same respondents said they thought disabled people have a lower quality of life.

However, only 3.5% of the surveyed physicians—or 25 out of 714—have disability accommodations at work.

Addressing Stigma in Medical Training

Meeks said obstetrics and gynecology is a specialty where she believes the presence of disabled doctors can shift the bias disabled patients face. She described the training environment and the residency matching process in this field as “unforgiving.” Both Meeks and Nguyen expected the gap to be much larger than it was.

Around 25% of the current research on health disparities among people with disabilities is focused on women, according to Meeks. This focus highlights the persistent biases that disabled women face. 

A recent systematic review identified a wide range of reasons disabled women struggle to receive adequate medical care, including cost, healthcare providers’ lack of knowledge, and insufficient accommodations.

“If we can bring more physicians with disabilities into OBGYN, there is a pathway to practice that is direct to reducing these perceptions of what it means to be disabled,” she said.

Another further area for exploration is whether disabled doctors are, implicitly or explicitly, being pushed towards certain specialties, according to Nguyen.

“I wonder whether there is a significant drop off from matriculation and what students originally wanted to go into,” Nguyen said. “Because oftentimes advice during medical school, either counseling or subconscious or hidden curriculum, often deter students from specific specialty because of the chance of matching.”

Despite all the negativity that tends to stem from research into disability representation in the medical workforce, Meeks said the small increase in the number of doctors with disabilities offers a glimmer of hope. She and her colleagues believe this data can help dismantle the misconception among residency program administrators that they have far fewer disabled matches than they actually do. 

“[This] data can be used to disrupt the assumptions that some people in those professions may make about who is amongst them in their training programs,” Meeks said.