Hi, everyone. My name is Jenna Barrett. I'm a fourth-year medical student at OUHCOM. I worked on this study with Dr. Allison Hughes, our principal investigator, as well as Olivia Dillman, a third-year medical student at OUHCOM. Our pilot study was focused on building disability competency in osteopathic medical students in rural Ohio. A little bit of background on this research, it's been shown that Appalachian-based care for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, or IDD, falls far below the standard of care. Contributing factors include socioeconomic disparities, barriers to healthcare access, as well as a lack of healthcare providers in these remote Appalachian communities. Compared to Ohio adults with disabilities, those in the Appalachian region are more likely to live below the poverty line, have lower educational attainment, and be unemployed. Improving care in these communities is especially important because the largest proportion of Ohioans with disabilities live in these Appalachian counties. Figure 1 on the left has data taken directly from the CDC website on disability and health promotion. The graph represents health disparities faced by adults with disabilities in Ohio. So here, the orange lines represent individuals with disabilities, and the blue lines represent individuals without disabilities. And as you can see, individuals with disabilities are more likely to report higher rates of depression, obesity, smoking, diabetes, heart disease, and long COVID. Our objective with this pilot study was to determine whether a focused training session on IDD targeted towards medical students would impact their understanding of IDD, empathy, or bias towards this population. The ultimate goal, of course, being to improve care for individuals with IDD specifically in these rural communities. A little bit about our methods. We used surveys as the primary methodology in this study. Participants in this study completed three pre-test surveys that evaluated knowledge, empathy, and bias towards individuals with IDD. The Jefferson Empathy Scale was used to assess empathy. This questionnaire involves 20 items, with half the items being positively worded and the other half negatively worded, and items are rated on a Likert scale. The Attitudes Towards Disabled Persons was used to assess bias, and this questionnaire involves two sets of items, 10 that describe people with disabilities and 10 items that describe how they're treated, and this is also rated with a Likert scale. Following those pre-test surveys, participants of the study completed a three-hour in-person training session on IDD. The training session had three components. The first one was a brief informational session on IDD, and that was led by Dr. Allison Hughes. The second part was a Q&A panel of both people with IDD and their caregivers, and then there were two research presentations from established social scientists who've conducted research in the field of IDD and health disparities. After that training session, the same three surveys were administered to participants. A little bit about our demographics of participants. Participants in the study included first and second year medical students at OUHCOM, with 66.6% being first year students. The average age of participants was 26 years old, and two participants reported having a family member with IDD. So figure two in this center column shows the demographics of our participants. The blue represents white females, the orange represents black females, and the green represents black males. As you can see, the majority of participants, 83.3%, were identified as female, and there were equal distributions of black and white participants. The response rate for the study was 66%, with a total of six participants, and paired t-tests were used to determine if there were significant differences between the pre- and post-test scores on attitudes, empathy, and knowledge of IDD. So figure three on the right shows a representation of scores from all three surveys administered during the training. The light blue represents mean pre-test scores for all participants, and the dark blue represents mean post-test scores for all participants. On the far left are scores from the general knowledge survey, and our study did find a significant difference in knowledge scores from the pre-test to the post-test, with a p-value of .001. In the middle are results from the empathy survey, and our study also found a significant difference in empathy scores for pre- and post-test, with a p-value of .41. And then on the far right are scores from the attitude survey, and differences between pre- and post-test for attitudes towards persons with disabilities were not statistically significant. In summary, our results revealed that the training intervention significantly improved knowledge about IDD and empathy towards patients with IDD among the medical students who participated, but it had no significant effect on their attitudes towards disabled persons. So our sample size was small. This was a pilot study, and participants were selected from a single rural medical school in Appalachia. So they can't be generalized quite yet. However, this pilot study does provide some encouraging data that focused education and training in IDD could be beneficial for future physicians and their patients, and some future directions of the study might be attempting this training on a larger scale, maybe a school-wide scale, or a curriculum-based scale. Thank you so much for your time!

disability competency

osteopathic medical students

intellectual and developmental disabilities

Appalachian healthcare

medical education