Persons with disabilities have an equal right to access health services, including general services and disability-related services. In accessing care, persons encounter many barriers. These include stereotypes about disability on the part of care providers; a lack appropriately-trained staff; imbalanced power relationships between needs medical professionals; inaccessible facilities; health-re...

BACKGROUND The development of effective treatments for use by non-specialists is listed among the top research priorities for improving the lives of people with mental illness worldwide. The purpose of this review is to appraise which interventions for children with intellectual disabilities or lower-functioning autism spectrum disorders delivered by non-specialist care providers in community s...

The decision to initiate enteral feedings is multifaceted, involving medical, financial, cultural, and emotional considerations. Children who have developmental or acquired disabilities are at risk for having primary and secondary conditions that affect growth and nutritional well-being. This clinical report provides (1) an overview of clinical issues in children who have developmental or acqui...

Young people with physical disabilities experience greater difficulty than their able-bodied peers in many psychosocial domains as they transition toward adulthood. However, firsthand knowledge of the dimensions of social support that young people with physical disabilities find useful during this stage is lacking. This qualitative study involved 50 participants (21 youths with spina bifida and...

This study examined the efficacy of one method for teaching diagnostic reasoning to occupational therapy students. During a clinical reasoning seminar in their first academic year, 80 entry-level occupational therapy master's degree students in three successive classes were given three different levels of exposure to classroom-as-clinic or in-class evaluations of adults with physical or psychos...

Studies have shown that stigmatization is linked to lower quality of life; however, only scant research has examined the association between family caregivers' internalization of stigma (affiliate stigma) and their subjective quality of life (subjective well-being, SWB). Furthermore, studies have rarely examined this association via comparison between caregivers of individuals with different de...

OBJECTIVE The use and nonuse of assistive technology devices in school by students with physical disabilities was investigated, and the students' experiences in using these devices is described. METHOD We used a mixed-methods approach with predominantly qualitative methods to collect and analyze data, which included observations of and interviews with 20 students with physical disabilities an...

Almost 300,000 children in the United States from birth to 3 years of age are affected by a developmental disability. Disabilities have a lasting effect on a child’s development and, in turn, may have a psychosocial impact on the child’s family. In addition, the limitations of a child with a disability are often related to family members’ stress, depression, and feelings of helplessness. Accord...

The Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL) measures health-related quality of life, a growing area of research, particularly among individuals with disabilities. This research is necessary to fully understand the varied needs of the population and, ultimately, ensure that those needs are being met. The current study assessed the reliability and validity of the PedsQL in individuals with i...

The use of psychosocial criteria to assess candidates for organ transplantation may violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability or on the basis of eligibility criteria that disproportionately affect persons with disabilities. When organ programs deny access to a person because of schizophrenia, they are denying an organ on the b...