Inclusive healthcare for people with intellectual disabilities: The impact of labelling and biomedical causal beliefs

Abstract

Background

People with intellectual disabilities often face inequalities in healthcare, including a lack of sensitivity on the part of healthcare professionals who are less able to identify and recognise these people’s health needs despite the desire to make healthcare accessible.

Aims

This study examined the links between variables related to intellectual disability literacy and variables related to stigma which may be related to healthcare professionals’ sensitivity to the health needs of people with intellectual disabilities.

Method and procedure

An online cross-sectional survey was conducted with 163 healthcare professionals. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the following vignettes, with two presentation conditions (labelled or unlabelled) and two gender conditions (male or female), and the participants were asked to complete an intellectual disability literacy scale (IDLS, Scior & Furnham, 2011).

Results

Only 31 % of healthcare professionals in the unlabelled condition recognise a neurodevelopmental disorder. Furthermore, the label predicts an attribution of biomedical causal beliefs and fewer environmental causal beliefs than the unlabelled condition. Moreover, the belief in a biomedical cause predicts a reduction in social distance. Finally, gender and label seem to affect social distance.

Conclusions and implications

Healthcare professionals are not sufficiently aware of intellectual disability (i.e., recognition of symptoms, causes of the disorder). These findings seem all the more important given that our results indicate that attributing a biomedical cause to a person’s situation helps reduce social distance, which is an essential element in caring for people. It therefore seems essential to promote practices aimed at improving access to inclusive healthcare.