1208 - Disability competencies in the licensure examinations of rehabilitation professions

Objectives: Disability-centric content in the education of health providers is often limited and highly variable across programs. Despite rehabilitation being a disability-centric field, it is unclear whether disability competencies are tested in the licensure exams of professions commonly involved in the rehabilitation team. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the congruency of the licensure exams for eight health professions and members of the rehabilitation team with the Alliance for Disability in Health Care Education's Core Competencies.

Design: We performed a cross-sectional descriptive analysis of publicly available official exam content outlines via key word search and manual mapping to identify the presence of Core Competencies. The professions included allopathic and osteopathic physicians, registered nurses, speech language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, clinical social workers, and physician assistants.

Results: The median number of Core Competencies addressed by the content outlines was three (range 1-4). The most common Core Competency was Competency 2 (professionalism and patient-centered care; 8/8 exams), often in the context of using interpretive services or accessible forms of communication. No content outline addressed Competency 4 (teams and systems-based care), and only one addressed Competency 3 (legal obligations). The exams for physical therapy, occupational therapy, and clinical social work addressed the most competencies (4/6); the exam for physician assistants addressed the fewest (1/6). The median number of uses of the words “disabilit(y/ies)” and “disabl(ed/ing)” within content outlines was 1.5 (range: 0-11), with two outlines lacking any uses.

Conclusions: On average, the licensure exams of these eight professions, as proxied by their content outlines, addressed only half of the Core Competencies on Disability and often in a limited, specific manner. With the high and increasing prevalence of disability among American adults, health professions—especially those frequently involved with rehabilitation—should strive to educate and assess their students using a disability-competent curriculum.