Cross Disability

Presenters discussed the impact of Long COVID on the lived experiences of people with disabilities in terms of healthcare utilization and employment. The presenters reviewed current and prior research on Long COVID and identified research gaps on COVID-related issues among people with disabilities. Participants also shared the development of a novel coaching-based intervention to help people with disabilities succeed at work. The video was recorded as a webinar in November 2023.

The objective of this scoping review was to systematically identify the environmental factors that impacted people with disability in the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors found that the social determinants of health for people with disability were not adequately considered in the acute phase of infection prevention at the population level.

This article in May 2023 issue of Work and Occupations draws on separate strands of research documenting the psychological consequences of (a) precarious employment and other challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and (b) ableism, incorporating both into an examination of disability-based differences in the joint significance of discrimination and work precarity during the pandemic for mental health.

In this article in Disability and Health Journal, researchers used data from the American Community Survey from 2008 to 2020 and the Current Population Survey over May 2020 to April 2022 period to compare people with and without disabilities in the expansion of telework as the pandemic began, and to discuss the evolution of telework during the pandemic. While workers with disabilities were more likely than those without disabilities to telework before the pandemic, they were less likely to telework during the pandemic. The occupational distribution accounts for most of this difference.

The brief outlines the benefits and drawbacks of remote work for people with disabilities, with the hopes of influencing policy in individual workplaces and on local, state and federal levels, blending together three previous publications from the Disability Inclusive Employment Policy RRTC, from the Disability and Health Journal, the Journal of Cancer Survivorship, and the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation.

This plain-language brief summarizes a study of the very high number of deaths from COVID-19 among people receiving long-term services and supports (LTSS) who lived in nursing homes. The brief defines excess mortality and describes the studies findings, including graphics comparing mortality rates for both younger and older LTSS receipients, compared to the general population. The brief also explains why these rates may be higher, including individual factors and barriers to services and supports.

This Health Affairs datawatch article uses health plan data to calculate excess mortality rates for Medicaid home and community-based services recipients during March-December 2020. For younger recipients, excess mortality was 7.4 times  that of other community-dwelling Medicaid beneficiaries and 26.6 times that of the general population. As a proportion of expected mortality, excess mortality rates for older recipients and nursing home residents were comparable.

In this working paper, researchers evaluated employment trends for people with and without disabilities over the course of the COVID-19 recession and subsequent employment recovery, both overall and by occupational category (essential, non-essential, teleworkable, non-teleworkable, frontline, nonfrontline) using data from the nationally representative Current Population Survey. As the COVID-19 recession began in the second quarter of 2020, people with disabilities experienced employment losses that were proportionately similar to those experienced by people without disabilities.

This article from Frontiers in Psychology explores in-depth the experiences and reflections of seven practicing therapists, on the impact of telehealth and remotely delivered physical therapy/physiotherapy (telePT) on the operationalization of relationship-based, family-centered methods into therapy. In response to the throttling of children’s therapy programs precipitated by COVID-19 shutdowns, interest in the use of telehealth has increased among service providers at both the clinical and administrative levels.

This journal article used data from the American Community Survey to compare people with and without disabilities in the expansion of telework as the pandemic began, and the evolution of telework during the pandemic. The authors concluded that many people with disabilities benefit from working at home, and the pandemic has increased employer acceptance of telework, but the current occupational distribution limits this potential. Tighter labor markets during the recovery offer hope that employers will increasingly hire people with disabilities in both telework and non-telework jobs.