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Social support experiences of students and clinicians with disabilities in health professions

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Abstract

Social support is vital in promoting the health, well-being, and performance of students and clinicians in health professions. Health settings' demanding and competitive nature imposes unique challenges on students and clinicians with disabilities. This paper aims to explore the trajectories and experiences of social support interactions amongst students and clinicians with disabilities in health professions. In a qualitative longitudinal study, 124 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 health students and 29 health clinicians with disabilities. Data analysis was informed by grounded theory as an adapted analytic approach involving constant comparisons. A few main characteristics of social support and trajectories in which social support is negotiated emerged from the data: (1) The need to be accepted and not questioned when asking for support, (2) Support interactions that do not heighten otherness, (3) Failure to acknowledge the challenges, (4) Interactions that support the process of disclosure (5) Interactions that allow mobilization of social support without strain or an extra effort. These findings have important implications for designing more supportive health professions, educational programs, and workplaces for people living with disabilities.

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Notes

  1. In this work we intentionally move between “person-first” (“a person living with a disability”) and “identity-first” (“disabled person”) language, to recognize the various preferences of disabled people for these language constructions (for more details, see Dunn & Andrews, 2015; Gernsbacher, 2017).

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Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research: This study was supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), application Number 312411.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Counseling and Human Development, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Yael Mayer

  2. Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Yael Mayer, Laura Nimmon, Laura Yvonne Bulk, Alfiya Battalova, Michael Lee & Tal Jarus

  3. Department of Occupational Therapy, Ono Academic College, Kiryat Ono, Israel

    Michal Shalev

  4. School of Rehabilitation Therapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

    Terry Krupa

  5. Centre for Health Education Scholarship, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Laura Nimmon

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  1. Yael Mayer
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Correspondence to Yael Mayer.

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Mayer, Y., Shalev, M., Nimmon, L. et al. Social support experiences of students and clinicians with disabilities in health professions. Adv in Health Sci Educ 28, 477–497 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-022-10169-9

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