Medical Students with Disabilities: A Generation of Practice

Medical Students with Disabilities:
A Generation of Practice
Preface
The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and its
Section 504 prohibited discrimination
against individuals with disabilities. In
1979, the AAMC published a report of its
Special Advisory Panel on Technical
Standards for Medical School Admission to
assist medical school faculty in determining
precisely what requirements were essential
for earning an M.D. degree from their
school. Also in 1979, the United States
Supreme Court decided the seminal case
of Southeastern Community College v.
Davis, in which the issue of whether an
institution was required to modify its
admission standards for a student with a
physical disability was first addressed.
In 1990, Congress passed the Americans
with Disabilities Act that reinforced and
extended the nondiscrimination concepts
of Section 504. In 1993, the AAMC
published The Disabled Student in Medical
School: An Overview of Legal Requirements,
which was designed to help medical
schools understand and comply with the
ADA. At that time, only a handful of
court decisions had been handed down
to provide guidance on Section 504 in a
medical school setting and virtually no
court cases applying the ADA to medical
schools were available.
In the twelve years since the AAMC
published The Disabled Student in Medical
School, numerous court cases applying
Section 504 and the ADA to medical and
other health professional schools have
been decided. In the discussion that
follows, the authors rely on those cases,
along with written opinions from the
United States Department of Education
Office for Civil Rights (OCR), to provide
an overview to medical schools on the
state of the law today. In some instances,
pertinent holdings from ADA employment
cases are used to illustrate aspects of the
ADA when courts have not yet decided an
issue in the educational context.
Disability law is dynamic, and the
opinions of the various courts and agencies
reflect the continued evolution of thinking
in this area. Section 504 and the ADA
require fact-intensive, case-by-case analysis.
As a result, some of the early OCR
opinions cited by the authors might be
decided differently by the OCR or the
courts today. Also, as with many areas of
the law, there is not complete agreement
among the courts on the interpretation of
certain aspects of the ADA. While the
guidance provided in this document is
not a substitute for case specific legal
advice, it should provide the reader with a
general sense of how to work through the
challenging application of Section 504
and the ADA in the context of a medical
school setting.
The legal issues associated with students
with disabilities do not end with the
conclusion of the admission process.
Medical schools need to adopt policies
and procedures that apply throughout the
various stages of their educational
continuum from admission and basic
science courses through clinical rotations
and graduation. A collaborative,
team-oriented approach to drafting and
implementing policies and procedures
will serve schools well.
I would like to thank our colleagues in
the Office of University Counsel for the
University of Colorado for their detailed
research and thoughtful analysis in
writing Medical Students with
Disabilities: A Generation of Practice.
Jordan J. Cohen, M.D.
President
3 Association of American Medical Colleges, 2005