Community Engagement in Health Care: An Approach to Improve Health Care Access for People with Disabilities

Abstract

People with disabilities (PWD) experience significant health disparities, at least partly due to difficulties accessing health care. These difficulties are multi-focal, including difficulties with transportation, effective communication, physical accessibility, and provider attitudes. Community engagement offers one method for working with local communities around health care access for PWD. By engaging PWD and the local infrastructure (e.g., providers, government, transportation, advocates), unique solutions are generated and awareness in the community is increased. We describe the use of our approach "Community Engagement in Health Care" with one such Oregon community.

Keywords

• Health Services Accessibility
• Accommodation
• Disabilities
• health care
• health disparities