Communicating reasonable adjustments to improve accessibility of patient services

Authors: Whittington, P., Dogan, H., Phillips, J.T., Phillips, H. and Pochin, I.

Journal: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Pages: 481-485

DOI: 10.1145/3652037.3663910

Abstract:

Patients with disabilities can require reasonable adjustments to be communicated in advance to hospitals, e.g. accessibility requirements, so that clinicians are aware of their needs. In this paper, we describe the HealthAbility concept as an add-on questionnaire to the DrDoctor platform. HealthAbility is based on the previously developed Authentibility Pass Android application. Authentibility Pass allows users with disabilities to communicate their authentication and accessibility requirements to organizations. The paper presents the preliminary designs of the questionnaire that have resulted from collaborations with two National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trusts in the United Kingdom (UK). The accessibility requirements domains have been identified based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) Framework developed by World Health Organization (WHO) and preliminary discussions with the NHS Foundation Trusts. The designs of the Formstack questionnaire are illustrated and the development considerations are discussed, including the future phases of the development. We believe that the development of a HealthAbility questionnaire integrated with DrDoctor will increase the awareness of clinicians and hospital staff to the patients' reasonable adjustments, resulting in higher levels of patient satisfaction.

Source: Scopus