Recap: Healthcare webinar
An Overview of the February 2025 Understanding Ableism Webinar: “Healthcare”
By Colin Wilfrid, AmeriCorps KCDC Coordinator
In the Spring of 2020, the King County Disability Consortium (KCDC) was formed to remedy King County’s initial COVID-19 recovery plan lacking input from the disability community. One of the ideas that stood out as a way in which KCDC can have an impact beyond the monthly Zoom meetings they hosted since its beginning was to hold another series of monthly Webinars called the Understanding Ableism series. The plan for these Understanding Ableism webinars was to feature guest speakers that were either members of the disability community themselves or people who worked with them, with the topics of every webinar centering around a different aspect impacting the disability community each month. Each of the webinars would be recorded and posted to YouTube.
The Understanding Ableism series kicked off in January of 2021 with positive reviews. With the webinars being recorded and posted to YouTube in addition to being broadcasted live on their respective dates, people not just from King County but across the United States praised the webinars and admitted to learning a lot from how ableism impacts people with disabilities’ lives. Unfortunately, the Understanding Ableism series, just like KCDC as a whole, began at a time where most Americans had no choice but to work and go to school from home. KCDC was able to conduct an Understanding Ableism webinar for every month of 2021, but as the calendar year changed, many people without disabilities began to believe that the COVID-19 Pandemic was “over.” This led to in-person jobs and activities becoming the norm again, and less attention being paid to organizations that began as remedies to lack of COVID-19 caution like KCDC. As a result of the “return to normal,” KCDC’s monthly meetings got less attendance, and their Understanding Ableism series was put on pause.
As KCDC entered an era where many people without disabilities believed the pandemic was “over,” it eventually became clear that the consortium needed to do some restructuring. Starting in 2024, the Disability Empowerment Center made arrangements to contract an AmeriCorps member to serve as their KCDC Coordinator. As the first AmeriCorps member serving at the Disability Empowerment Center as KCDC Coordinator, one of the most important tasks I was given was to come up with a way to revive the Understanding Ableism series that fits how society changed since KCDC held their last Understanding Ableism webinar in 2021.
The first Understanding Ableism webinar since 2021 focused on accessibility in healthcare. It took place on February 18, 2025, and was a huge success. One key difference that made this webinar stand out from the 2021 Understanding Ableism webinars was that our guest speakers were from different parts of the United States, as opposed to just the Puget Sound area. This webinar’s guest speakers were Zuzana Skvarkova, a disability justice advocate and TED Talk speaker from Arizona, and Justin Steinberg, a Stanford University research assistant from California. Loretta Claiborne, a Special Olympics athlete from Pennsylvania, was also going to join the webinar as a third guest speaker, but she ended up not joining because she experienced technical difficulties.
The healthcare experiences that Zuzana and Justin brought to the table were similar in some ways, and different in other ways. For instance, Zuzana talked about how doctors not asking specific questions about her health has led to healthcare accessibility being difficult for her as someone who was not diagnosed with autism until her adulthood. Justin, on the other hand, talked about how he got the supports he needed for longer due to having a lot of experience in receiving healthcare as a kid and as a teen, but he still sees ableist exploits in healthcare access today such as how people with disabilities who cannot drive are forced to rely on inefficient and inaccessible public transit systems to get to their appointments. Both speakers acknowledged that COVID-19 is still a highly infectious disease that largely impacts people with disabilities, even though many Americans have been led to believe that “COVID is over.” Zuzana recalled where she was and how worried she felt when President Biden announced that he was ending the COVID-19 national emergency, and Justin talked about how he still wears a mask in public even though he recovered from his only COVID infection so far just fine, because he knows there are people who are more vulnerable to COVID out there.
Despite technical difficulties preventing Loretta Claiborne from speaking on this webinar, there was a clear reason why I invited her to speak on it. As a Special Olympics athlete and advocate, she continually went to Washington to talk to members of the United States government on how they could better include people with disabilities. One of the issues that she is passionate about is healthcare. In her TED Talk, recorded on December 11th, 2012, Loretta talked about how after being denied healthcare for most of her adolescent life, she finally received healthcare when she joined Special Olympics. This motivated Loretta to speak up and let her audiences know that there were still many people who were denied healthcare as of late 2012, and how the process of accessing healthcare needed to be easier for people with intellectual disabilities.
The bottom line of this Understanding Ableism webinar is that the healthcare system continually exploits the disability community. This is seen in medical workers’ practices by not prioritizing them, thinking healthcare workers know more about the disability community than people with disabilities themselves, and seeing people with disabilities as “less than.” As both Zuzana and Justin acknowledged, the reason why these practices still occur in healthcare today is because medical schools do not even bother teaching their students how to treat patients with disabilities in a way that is non-discriminatory and does not violate the ADA or Section 504. As a result, medical workers are not aware of the fact that people with disabilities expect that they are treated the same way people without disabilities are treated by medical workers. Whether it is realizing that COVID-19 is still a legitimate issue especially for people with disabilities, making the facility more accessible and sensory friendly, implementing feedback from self-advocates, or more research on inclusive health, the disability community hopes that the healthcare system can be improved upon to better include their voices.
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[Visual: Graphic with text “What we learned” and “Free webinar series.”]