Ableism Expert, Driven by Personal Experience, Paves the Way for Disability Equity: Meet Dr. Megan Morris
Women's History Month is celebrated annually in March to honor and recognize women's contributions, achievements, and struggles. GlobalMindED is proud to highlight the voices and work of influential women.
Megan Morris, PhD, MPH, CCC-SLP, is an Associate Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus . In her work, Dr. Morris focuses on provider and healthcare organization-level factors that affect the quality of care delivered to patients with disabilities. Dr. Morris’s research and advocacy have been shaped by both her personal and professional experiences of ableism in the healthcare setting.
What is your personal/professional story?
Growing up, people with disability were always a part of my life – both friends and family members. Unfortunately, that gave me a front-row seat to the discrimination experienced by people with disability. For example, I remember being appalled the summer before middle school after hearing that a good friend with spina bifida was not going to be able to go to our neighborhood school. The school had two floors with no reliable elevator and my friend used a wheelchair. During undergrad, I pursued a major in communication disabilities, followed by a master’s degree in speech-language pathology. After working with children and adults who used assistive technology to communicate due to significant speech disabilities (devices similar to what Steven Hawking used), I became frustrated with how much time and effort I had to spend arguing with insurance companies that people with communication disabilities have the right to technology to allow them to communicate and interact with their families, peers, teachers, etc. I then returned to school and received a Ph.D. focused on disability law and policy in the healthcare setting. Today I am an Associate Professor at the Anschutz Medical Campus. I conduct research full-time and focus on addressing disparities and discrimination experienced by people with disabilities in the healthcare setting.
What key moments in your life led you to where you are today? Where does your passion to serve come from?
Throughout most of my life, my uncle David lived with my grandparents about a mile from my house. David had a developmental disability, which included significant seizures. David was quite social. He loved walking the neighborhood, keeping tabs on everyone’s lawns and gossip. He regularly attended high school football games and a Bible study at a local church. As he aged, David began to have more and more seizures, which often meant he would fall and sustain injuries that would land him in the hospital. During these hospitalizations, it was often shocking to see how the healthcare team was unequipped and unsure of how to communicate and care for David. Once when visiting David, I found him tied to his bed with no way to contact his nurses. When I asked the nurses about this, they assumed that with his diagnosis of a developmental disability, David would pull out his IV and that he was unable to understand or speak. In front of the nurses, I turned to David and engaged him in a conversation about how he was feeling, the upcoming holidays, and national politics.
The assumptions and biases David experienced in healthcare had devastating outcomes. In 2016, David was hospitalized due to pneumonia. He was quite sick and very weak, and he was too weak to swallow. David was treated for pneumonia but he still was unable to swallow food or drink without it going directly into his lungs. The doctors let us know they were ready to discharge him and wanted to discuss what to do about his inability to eat or drink. We asked if we could try for a few days a tube that would go down his nose and into his stomach to feed him, or an NG tube. The doctors were unsure about this as they stated that it would be “uncomfortable” and therefore cruel. Instead, they recommended that David be put on hospice. We argued that David had one of these tubes before and tolerated it just fine and that he actually had a really high pain tolerance. Unfortunately, the doctors decided not to try the tube and discharged David home with the recommendation that he eat and drink. Within 24 hours, David developed pneumonia again and this time he did not recover. He passed away several days later.
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David’s story is not unique. I have heard countless similar stories from people with disabilities and their families. In my work, I have tried to honor David and people like him by advocating for change in healthcare and conducting research on how to improve the care delivered to people with disabilities.
As an example of the work that I have pursued, I began the Disability Equity Collaborative, which is a community of diverse stakeholders invested in addressing ableism and disparities in the healthcare setting. We have several workgroups, including a learning collaborative of healthcare systems from all regions of the United States who get together to support, encourage, and offer advice and solutions to each other on how to advance disability equity. Through the Disability Equity Collaborative, we have advocated for national changes in issues such as ensuring that disability status is included in federal standards for electronic health records alongside other demographic characteristics such as race and ethnicity. We helped coordinate and gather signatures for the successful efforts last fall to have the National Institute of Health include disability as a disparity population.
How can GlobalMindED help you reach your goals?
Unfortunately, disability is often not included in diversity and inclusion efforts. It is important that we recognize the discrimination and abuses that people with disabilities have historically experienced in healthcare, education, employment, etc. Often the first step is naming disability and ableism. We need to de-stigmatize disability and recognize it as a part of the human experience. GlobalMindED is a forum for these issues to be raised, discussed openly, and solved through legislation, collaboration, and education so that people like David are seen, heard, valued, appreciated, and understood- as all people deserve.
Dr. Morris received a master's of Science in Speech-Language Pathology, a Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Sciences, and a master's of Public Health all from the University of Washington. She completed post-doctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and the Mayo Clinic in health services research. She has served as a faculty member at the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Colorado Medical School.
Dr. Morris has published in key medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and the Joint Commission Journal on Patient Safety and Quality. Dr. Morris is the founder and director of the Disability Equity Collaborative, a community aimed at advancing equitable care for patients with disabilities through practice, policy and research.