FAIRBORN, Ohio — Tom Webb, the Director of Disability Services at Wright State University in Dayton, works with nearly 1,000 students with documented disabilities and helps to navigate their college experience both in and out of the classroom.

What You Need To Know

  • The  Disability Resource Professional, (DRP), program is funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation and support from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
  • There are more than 50 million people with disabilities across the U.S. 

  • The program is underway and started with a series of discussions about disability accommodations in medical education

“It makes a lot of sense to have greater representation of people with disabilities in the fields of medicine,” Webb said.

Recently, Webb, who has Cerebral Palsy, was chosen to lead a national training program at the university, with a goal of improving access to medical education for people with disabilities.

“They actually chose 18 individuals from across the country and I was chosen to be one of those participants,” Webb said. “It exposes me to a lot of other professionals that are doing creative things in the area of accommodation for their students with disabilities in med schools.”

The Disability Resource Professional, or DRP Academy, is a one-year professional development experience for students passionate about a career in the medical field.

“Will be really beneficial for me when it comes to knowing how to better work with our students but also, kind of where our limitations are,” Webb said. “Just saying, sorry you can’t be in a surgery setting because you have a wheelchair. That’s not going to cut it. How do we look at that more creatively?”

Webb said accommodations are needed for medical students that have ADHD or processing-related disabilities.

“Could be something that they’re using an Apple watch to dictate or to talk to in terms of speech to text, some of the notes they need to take—working with patients, working with clients,” Webb said. “That technology wasn’t available 10 years ago.”

Webb is no stranger to being in the public eye and has been since he was a young child in Maryland.

He’s worked on disability policy on Capitol Hill, but has been found at Wright State University over the last eight years.

Webb is proud of the fact more students with disabilities are choosing Wright State for their education, and he promises to fight for them, and continue to break down stigmas.

“I expect as we get better as a country, kind of within the field of higher ed, within med schools, I think we’re going to see even more of an uptick in participation in med schools with people with disabilities,” Webb said.