Main Library
There are numerous health inequities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). They experience lower rates of preventive screening; higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease; lower life expectancy; and higher rates of pregnancy complications. If that’s not enough, they have been at nearly six times greater risk of dying from COVID-19.
What is driving these disparities? There are a number of contributing factors, including unconscious bias against people with disabilities, physical access barriers, and inequities due to unmet social determinants of health, to name a few. But there is one area where health care policy makers and leaders can have an immediate impact for the 10 to 16 million people with IDD in the US. That is: by educating the health care workforce to meet the needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
I started practicing in this hidden and unknown field of medicine in the late 1990s. As medical director for a large, state-run program for people with IDD, I was put in charge of the health care of several hundred people with severe and profound levels of intellectual and developmental disabilities. At first, I thought, “No worries, it’s just like any other area of general practice.” But it was only a matter of a few days before I realized how ill prepared I was, even as a board-certified family physician, to meet these individuals’ health care needs.