Innovative Approach to Address Disability Concepts and Standardized Patients With Disability in an Undergraduate Curriculum.

Abstract

Despite a growing population of people with disabilities (PWD), health care professionals, including nurses, receive little educational preparation to provide health care to them. To address this issue in nursing education, the faculty of a school of nursing designed and implemented an innovative teaching strategy that can be adopted by other nursing programs and faculty. A systematic plan was developed and implemented to integrate standardized patients with disabilities (SPWD) into an existing undergraduate nursing program. Steps included careful planning, review, and modification of existing simulation-based scenarios, obtaining buy-in of faculty across the curriculum, recruitment and training of PWD to be SPWD, and implementation of the project. The program in which all undergraduate nursing students have repeated contact with SPWD has been successfully implemented throughout the curriculum. The project addressed the multiple calls to improve the preparation of health care professionals to provide quality care to PWD. [J Nurs Educ. 2018;57(12):760-764.].