Medical Student Choices Regarding Ventilator Allocation for People With Disabilities.

Researchers asked first-year medical students to choose who would get a ventilator during a COVID-19 shortage.

Students wrote short reasons for each choice. No real patients were involved; it was a classroom exercise.

The team then read the answers to see if students openly used disability as a reason to deny care.

The students never said, “This person should not get the machine because they have a disability.”

Instead they talked about life expectancy, other illnesses, and “social worth.”

So the study found no clear disability bias in the written answers.

Hoang et al. (2023) go one step further. They used remote BST to teach students how to calm and examine patients with neurodevelopmental disabilities. Skills went up and stayed up two weeks later.

Sullivan et al. (2014) also moved past attitudes. Four swim practices with teammates who had disabilities raised college students’ comfort scores in a real RCT.

Werner et al. (2011) looked at 512 health students and found that positive attitudes and peer pressure predicted who planned to work with people with intellectual disabilities. Carly et al. (2021) did not ask about future plans, so the new data extend the 2011 picture.

Perrot et al. (2021) show the flip side: in schools, White and richer families get more autism services. That real-world gap makes the “no bias” ventilator result surprising, but the two settings are very different.

You teach future nurses, doctors, or RBTs. Knowing that students can hide bias in writing means you need to watch what they do, not just what they say. Add live role-plays like Hoang’s virtual BST. Pair students with clients who have disabilities early and often, as in the unified-sports study. These steps turn polite answers into real skills and fair treatment.