Disabled Nurses: Assets, Not Burdens

Image description: A brown woman with long brown curly hair, blue scrubs, and a white post-surgical TLSO back brace smiles with her stethoscope pressed against an extended white arm wearing a black blood pressure cuff. This interdisciplinary health humanities research explores ableism experienced by disabled undergraduate nursing students across the United States while simultaneously challenging the ethical dilemma nursing faculty perceive in admitting disabled students to the profession. Despite the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), disabled nursing students across the United States disproportionately face discriminatory, systemic, institutional exclusion from Bachelor of Science in Nursing programs as they remain unrecruited, unadmitted, unenrolled, and unretained. As a profession, nursing offers inherently accommodating career pathways such as telehealth, administrative, informatics, outpatient, and research-based nursing. Additionally, disabled nursing students and nurses bring disability-concordance as well as ‘crip wisdom,’ or the knowledge and skills associated with being disabled, which are very useful to patient care. Disabled nurses are assets, not burdens to the nursing profession. This image of a disabled Arab Registered Nurse wearing an assistive device while providing patient care seeks to disrupt the harmful patient-provider dichotomy while illustrating that disabled healthcare providers exist. Image of Sabrina Jamal-Eddine shot by photographer Ja’van Carr.