Promoting Residents Excellence in Patient-Centered CARE (PREPARE) for Autistic Adults
Abstract
This project addresses the 2021 ARP Idea Development Award Areas of Interest by establishing a new training to improve future healthcare providers’ ability to care for autistic adults. Our new training will be designed for providers in internal medicine or family medicine residency programs. The training will have (1) recorded presentations that residents can watch at their own pace, (2) live discussions led by a faculty member or clinician about how to use best practices in different situations, and (3) mock clinical visits with autistic actors/actresses for experience applying best practices. This training is called PREPARE for Autistic Adults. It will increase the number of healthcare providers who are willing and able to deliver high-quality care for autistic adults. We will partner with an advisory group of autistic adults and caregivers of autistic adults to develop the training materials. Then we will get feedback on the training materials from faculty and residents from 15 residency programs at 12 different institutions. Faculty (n=30) and residents (n=30) will tell us what we can do to improve the training materials and increase the chance that this training could be used successfully at any institution. We will use this feedback to make changes to the training materials. Next, we will test the training with 20 medical residents. We will see how easy the training is to use, what residents thought about the training, and whether residents participated in all the training activities. We will use this information to further improve the training. Last, we will retest the training with 32 medical residents. We will see how it improved their confidence, knowledge, and attitudes/beliefs about providing evidence-based care for autistic adults. Innovation: The focus and design of our new training are innovative. Most autism trainings for healthcare providers focus on diagnosing autism in children and early interventions. However, our new healthcare provider training will focus specifically on better meeting the needs of autistic adults. This is the first adult-focused autism training for medical residents to our knowledge. If our training is ultimately used by internal medicine and family medicine residency programs across the United States, we will be able to train a large number of future providers in delivering high-quality care for autistic adults. The design of our training is also innovative because we will blend self-paced, live, and hands-on training components. This design makes it more likely that the participants will use the skills they learned during the training in the future. Impact: Over the next decade, half a million autistic adolescents will transition to adult healthcare systems that are not prepared to serve them. Due to difficulties accessing high-quality healthcare, many autistic adults experience poor health and wellbeing. One of the biggest difficulties autistic adults face is that there are too few adult healthcare providers with autism training. In the short term, we will train 52 residents to provide healthcare for autistic adults and establish a new training that can be used in residency programs across the United States. In the long term, we expect that this project and future work from our research team will increase autistic adults’ access to providers who are willing and able to meet their needs. We expect that improving autistic adults’ access to high-quality care will reduce their unmet healthcare needs and improve their health and wellbeing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 28, 2022
- Source ID
- W81XWH2210248
Entities
People
- Brittany N Hand
Organizations
- Ohio State University
- United States Army