Deaf Medical Student Successfully Completes Emergency Department Rotation

One strategy to reduce health disparities for the Deaf is to facilitate the training of students from their communities to become healthcare providers and educators. A barrier to this strategy is the unfounded fear by medical schools that accommodating Deaf students in fast-paced, stressful rotations such as Emergency Medicine is either not possible or too difficult and expensive.

Meeks et al. describe the case of a Deaf medical student who successfully completed an Emergency Department (ED) rotation, using the following strategies:
  1. The student disclosed the disability 2 months prior to the beginning of the rotation, giving the medical school staff time to craft the appropriate accommodations
  2. The ED and college disability directors held a training session for ED staff on how to work with deaf students in the clinical setting 2 weeks before the student arrived
  3. Designated interpreters with specialized training in healthcare terminology were hired for every experience the student would go through
  4. Captioning was added to the instructional videos that students were expected to watch
  5. Specialized signs were developed for medical terms that are not available in standard ASL
  6. Instructors typically give verbal instructions while demonstrating procedures to the students. This was difficult for the Deaf student to follow because it required watching the procedure and interpreter at the same time. The student was empowered to request the instruction in advance of the demonstration to overcome this obstacle.
  7. Quickly establishing positions for the interpreter to stand in the student's line-of-sight during procedures
At the end of the rotation, both the student and the ED staff gave positive feedback about the experience.



Meeks, L.M., Engelman, A., Booth, A., & Argenyi, M. (2018). Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Learners in Emergency Medicine. West J Emerg Med, 19(6), 1014-1018.

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