Sign Stage on Tour

Recruitment Email:

Greetings! We are contacting you today from the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) to provide some information about a research project that we are working on. The project is titled, “Determining Learning Objectives for Disability-Focused Simulated Patient Encounters through Focus Groups.” Most medical and pharmacy schools do not have a standardized approach to teaching patient-centered care for disabled individuals, including d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The goal of our project is to assess what is lacking and use this to improve the training of medical and pharmacy students to better serve members of the disability community.

In order for us to know how to improve, we need to hear from the Deaf and disability communities and strive to understand their concerns. For this reason, we are requesting your help. We will be conducting focus groups, in-person or online (over Zoom) in which we will be asking participants about their previous experiences with healthcare professionals and what they would like future healthcare professionals to know when interacting with patients with disabilities. If you identify as someone with a disability, we would be extremely interested in hearing about any good or bad experiences that you have had with healthcare workers. Your valuable feedback would help us to better train medical and pharmacy students at NEOMED to meet the needs of patients with disabilities.

We value your time and will compensate focus group participants in the form of a $25 gift card. If you want to participate in this study, please click on the link below to sign up for a time to review the consent process and let us know what you may need (like captions or an ASL interpreter) to be able to participate in a focus group. Feel free to share the link to sign up with any adult friends or family members who identify as disabled and may be interested in helping us with this project.

Link to interest, availability, and accessibility survey: https://neomed.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6X77lkCTjAiaf5Q

For further information, please review the attached informed consent document. We appreciate your time and attention, and we would love to hear from you!


Thank you,

Principal Investigator: Dr. Rachel Bracken, PhD - Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine; [email protected], (330) 325-6447.

Co-Investigator: Dr. Rebecca Fischbein, PhD - Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine; [email protected], (330) 325-6116.

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For our Deaf Theatre fans: The next Deaf Theatre play will be produced at Near West Theatre in Cleveland OH in the Fall of 2021. The working title is: "Alice in Wondeafland". If ANYTHING changes or something new is added between now and then... we will absolutely let everyone know ASAP. Thanks for being there and being supportive of the Sign Language Community. The Morgan