LAUSR

We welcome WATCCH, a widening participation programme in various healthcare careers for 16 to 18 year olds. The programme utilised various methods such as, networking, mentoring and coaching to empower individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds to make informed decisions regarding a variety of community healthcare careers [1]. Further, we value the benefits of diversity in a healthcare workforce that represents the society it serves, which contributes to improved quality of care for patients and staff wellbeing [1]. However, in our experience, increasing diversity in the healthcare workforce to better serve society includes improving access to widening participation programmes similar to WATCCH for disabled students; we define disability as a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term negative effect on ones ability to do normal daily activities. The United Kingdom Parliament highlighted a significant increasing pattern of disabled students attending higher education, a rise of 47% between 2014/15 and 2019/20 [2]. Nonetheless, disabled students continue to be underrepresented in higher education [2]. This multi-factorial problem was explored over a three year period by The National Integrated College in the UK. This identified that a significant factor of unsuccessful applications by disabled students to higher education was as a result of not having their learning support needs fully addressed by standard widening participation programmes [3] such as WATCCH. Although, when utilising widening participation programmes specifically designed to meet the learning needs of disabled students, there is a significant increase in the number of successful applications to higher education [3]. Disabled students find transition periods such as applying to higher education particularly challenging. Standard widening participation programmes that are not designed for disabled students are not fully effective at meeting transition needs of disabled students [3]. Similar to WATCCH’s delivery which utilises workshops, widening participation specifically for disabled students can address transition needs through workshops. This approach is effective at improving self advocacy and self esteem resulting in disabled learners gaining a greater understanding of the higher education ethos and increasing successful applications to higher education [3]. Diversity in community healthcare careers improves the quality of care provided to patients and increases staff wellbeing [1]. Disabled healthcare professionals have shown a positive impact towards disabled patients [4] and thrive at all career stages [5]. Disabled clinicians are able to draw on their personal experiences living with a disability to better shape the quality of patient interactions and a clinician’s own disability experiences can improve the quality of care and introduce disability cultural competence that can extend diagnostic and medicalised views of disability to include a social, cultural, and political understanding of what it means to live with disabilities and be counted as disabled [4]. Expanding the scope of WATTCH to incorporate specific widening participation programmes for disabled students can increase aspiration and self esteem of disabled students [4] in community careers. This also has the potential to further the increasing trend of disabled students entering higher education, which could lead to a variety of benefits for society.