Practitioners' Guide to Primary Care for Women with Physical Disabilities

Disabled women constitute 31 percent of working age Medicare beneficiaries and Medicaid recipients, and face numerous barriers to quality services within the health care system. BPA assembled a team of women with disabilities, researchers and medical professionals to develop a practitioners' guide to providing quality primary care for women with disabilities. The guide is designed to provide physicians, therapists, nurses, and other health care professionals with the information they need to provide more efficient and effective health care to women with disabilities.

The content of the guide was designed to respond to needs identified during an initial design phase, which used literature review and focus groups with physicians and other health professionals and focus groups with disabled women to identify:

  • information needs of physicians and other health providers in serving women with physical disabilities;
  • extent to which provider information needs vary by type of practitioner and by health care setting;
  • specific detailed content that will be needed to meet those needs;
  • existing materials and resources, as well as appropriate contributors and/or co-authors to be used in the development of the guide;
  • types of information formats and dissemination methods most likely to result in providers using this kind of information effectively; and
  • distribution mechanisms likely to reach the largest number of practitioners.
Based on the information gathered in the first phase, the second phase focused on securing the participation of contributing authors, editing and compiling the guide. The guide consists of two major parts. The first includes an overview of primary care for women with disabilities including general service delivery issues, exercise and nutrition, reproductive health care, stress management, substance abuse, and domestic violence, as well as concerns specific to disability such as fatigue, spasticity, pressure ulcers, bowel and bladder management, and autonomic dysreflexia. The second part consists of eight disability-specific chapters authored by physicians with specialized expertise in treating women with specific conditions including: arthritis and other autoimmune disorders, stroke, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, myopathies, polio, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury.

PUBLICATIONS:

Practitioners' Guide To Primary Care for Women with Physical Disabilities (Jun, 2005) (PDF:386KB)
The Practitioners' Guide to Primary Care for Women with Physical Disabilities is a series of articles authored over the last several years by physicians and other health care professionals with specific expertise in delivering care to women with physical disabilities.

ARTICLES:

Primary Health Care Considerations for Women with Physical Disabilities and Medical Aspects of Specific Disabling Conditions: