Improved Health Care for Adult Patients with I/DD

The Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities

Building Capacity to Improve Adult Health Care for Patients with I/DD

The goal of this project is to impart and improve the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of health care providers; leading to improved health care for adults with I/DD. The grantee will catalog existing curricula for health/allied health professionals that teach about caring for adult patients with I/DD and develop a resource list. They will lead focus groups of physicians to identify gaps in knowledge, barriers to providing care, and educational priorities. Based on their findings, they will develop and deliver two tiered-curricular-modules, each of which will be offered up to two times during the initial funding period. In total, up to four broad cohorts of practicing clinicians (Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Emergency Medicine) who provide care to adults will be trained. Each set of modules will consist of three pieces: a grand rounds presentation, a case conference presentation, and a self-advocate/family panel presentation. These training components will be implemented through mechanisms already in place in academic medical settings to maximize the ease of implementation, replicability of the model, and attendance at each session.