What strategies did graduates with disabilities in Health Sciences use to persist and not drop out their studies?

Abstract

This article analyses the difficulties that 16 graduate with disabilities from 8 Spanish universities in the area of Health Sciences experienced during their academic career. It also shows how they overcame these difficulties, as well as their insight into their own resilience. This qualitative study used semi-structured and individual interviews. The results showed that the difficulties, the strategies to deal with them, and the opinions of the participants about their resilient characteristics are multiple and relate to both external and internal factors. The results reveal that participants’ voices from these Health Sciences degree contain useful strategies for the ­university community to promote the academic success of students with disabilities for the benefit of all students.

Points of Interest

• Healthcare degrees tend to present greater challenges for students with disabilities.

• Students often experience exclusion during their healthcare training due to the fact that disability is based on a ‘medical’ perspective of disability.

• This paper analyses the difficulties and coping and resilience strategies used by university students with disabilities with a Bachelor’s degree in Health Sciences to successfully overcome these difficulties.

• Numerous internal and external factors enable students with disabilities to successfully complete health studies.

• This study can contribute that including students with disabilities in healthcare degrees improves healthcare improves for vulnerable populations, as well as the relationship between professionals and patients.

Keywords:

• Academic success
• graduates with disabilities
• barriers
• resilience
• health sciences

Author contributions

All the authors have contributed equally to the manuscript and approved the submitted version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that all data generated or analysed in this study are of an emerging nature and have been processed by an expert research team in the field, specifically the authors of this article. Moreover, the study presented here is part of a funded and competitive research project. With the aim to preserve the identity of the participants, the data has not been published or reported in any repository yet. In short, the data supporting this study are all available to the public at the time of its presentation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, State Research Agency and FEDER funds European Union (grant numbers EDU2020-112761RB-100/ Feder Funds). Furthermore, the first author of this manuscript (Inmaculada Orozco), thank to Juan De La Cierva Postdoctoral Fellowship (JDC2022-049600-I), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities/State Agency/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR. Finallty, the authors of this article also thank each participant in the research for their voluntary engagement and the time invested in this study.