Tag Archives: disability data

Identifying potential hospital bed shortages for people with disabilities

Recent models from ProPublica, Imperial College, and others predict that millions of people who contract COVID-19 will be hospitalized and many hospitals across the country may not be prepared to treat the influx of patients.

COVID-19 molecule

People with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to impacts from COVID-19, both directly and indirectly. While data about how this virus will impact the health and well-being of people with disabilities is currently limited, people with disabilities are often at greater risk of chronic health conditions, and thus may be more susceptible to infection. People with disabilities also face disruptions in services for daily needs, which could exacerbate conditions unrelated to COVID-19.

Overall, individuals who experience disability are at greater risk for being hospitalized either because they have contracted COVID-19 or because pre-existing health conditions have worsened.

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Research Snapshot: Expanding the Availability and Quality of Rural Data

Lillie Greiman speaking at a conference
Lillie Greiman

In order to create policies and programs that serve the needs of people with disabilities in rural communities, it is important to know things about them, such as demographic information and location. The federal government maintains several large data sets that collect this information. However, it can be difficult to access rural disability data from these data sets (see Data Limitations in the American Community Survey: The Impact on Rural Disability Research).

To address this, RTC:Rural is conducting rural analyses of existing large data sets to contribute to a national disability statistics resource.

Lillie Greiman, RTC:Rural Project Director, explains the project and its goals, and gives a quick progress update.

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Research Snapshot: Exploring Rural Disability Onset

RTC:Rural’s previous research has found that people who live in rural areas begin to experience disability from mobility, cognitive and sensory impairment as much as 10 years before people in urban areas. There are also higher rates of disability in rural areas across all age groups. We have also found that racial and ethnic minorities experience the highest disability rates as well as the greatest urban/rural differences.

While some people are born with a disability, most disability is acquired. This can happen suddenly by injury or slowly by chronic disease. Healing, disease course and medical treatment, underlying causes of disability, often fluctuate. This means people do not always report disability consistently over time.

In order to understand urban/rural differences, RTC:Rural is conducting research to understand how disability evolves in rural and urban areas.

Bryce Ward, RTC:Rural Statistician, explains the project and its goals, and gives a quick progress update.

Map of 2015 OMB County Designations. Click on map to link to web page with full text description and file for download.

Map of 2015 OMB County Designations showing urban and rural counties across the United States. Click on the map for a full text description and for a larger, downloadable version. To browse or download the data this map was created with, use our Disability Counts Data Finder tool.
Map produced July 2017.

 
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RTC:Rural researchers publish paper on health status and transitory disability

Screenshot of the first page of the journal article "Health status changes with transitory disability over time."RTC:Rural researchers Andrew Myers, Dr. Bryce Ward, Dr. Jennifer Wong, and Dr. Craig Ravesloot recently published a paper in the journal Social Science & Medicine titled “Health status changes with transitory disability over time.”  Myers is a RTC:Rural Project Director, Dr. Bryce Ward is the RTC:Rural Statistician, and Dr. Ravesloot is RTC:Rural Research Director. Dr. Wong is a former RTC:Rural Research Associate and University of Washington research fellow.

This paper builds on previous RTC:Rural research published in the Journal of Rural Health, titled “Transitory and enduring disability among urban and rural people,” and “Disability items from the Current Population Survey (2008-2015) and permanent versus temporary disability status,” published in the American Journal of Public Health. This study was a secondary analysis from a previous RTC:Rural study, which was published in 2016 in the Disability and Health Journal: “Why stay home? Temporal association of pain, fatigue and depression with being at home.”

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Visualizing disability data through maps: RTC:Rural’s state map series

Image of the people with disabilities: Alabama map on top of a background of other maps of Alabama showing different disability data.
Click on the image to view disability maps for the state of Alabama.

RTC:Rural’s Disability in America State Profile Map Series is well underway! We have maps for 17 states posted on the website so far, and more are coming soon. In the next two months general disability maps for every state (for example, Montana and Texas) and Puerto Rico will be complete and available on the RTC:Rural website. Once the general disability rate maps are completed, we will work to produce maps showing different topics for each state. These include:

  • Disability rates among females and males
  • People with vision, cognitive, mobility, self-care, and Independent Living difficulties
  • Veterans with disabilities
  • People with disabilities in poverty
  • Employment, unemployment, and out of labor force rates among people with disabilities
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People with disabilities living in the path of Hurricane Dorian

Map showing the number of people with disabilities (by county) living in the path of Hurricane Dorian. See text for full description.
Map of people with disabilities in the path of Hurricane Dorian. See below for larger, downloadable version and text description.

Understanding the needs of a community is imperative in order to effectively plan for natural disaster emergency response. As Hurricane Dorian heads toward the Florida coast, national, state and local community emergency planners are working to evacuate and shelter thousands of people who are fleeing their homes.

People with disabilities are one of many vulnerable groups especially at risk during natural disasters. In times of emergency, people will evacuate with their households, and will need to shelter with their households. It is not acceptable to separate families and households in times of crisis. Many family members are caregivers, so shelters need to be accessible so that people with disabilities and their families and caregivers can stay together.

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NIDILRR Research Review showcases importance of federal data in disability research

National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation ResearchOn February 22, RTC:Rural Director Dr. Catherine Ipsen participated in the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR)’s Administrative Data and Employment Research Review.

“The purpose of the Research Review was to showcase research projects that harness administrative data to improve services for people with disabilities,” Ipsen said. “In addition to representatives from the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), several researchers described projects that used administrative data to answer and inform research questions.” Continue reading →

RTC:Rural produces fact sheet on employment disparity for rural people with disabilities

screen shot of the first page of the fact sheet. In December 2018 the U.S. Census Bureau released the 2013-2017 American Community Survey summary data. In the recently released fact sheet “Employment disparity grows for rural Americans with disability,” RTC:Rural researchers used this data to begin exploring how employment rates have changed for people with disabilities in the context of changing economic conditions. They found increasing disparities between people with and without disabilities across the country as well as across the rural-urban continuum.

Click the links below to download the fact sheet from the RTC:Rural and Rural Institute ScholarWorks collection:

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RTC:Rural researchers publish article on disability rates in Journal of Rural Health

Screenshot of the cover of the manuscript.

First page of the article “Transitory and Enduring Disability Among Urban and Rural People” in the Journal of Rural Health.

RTC:Rural researchers Dr. Rayna Sage, Dr. Bryce Ward, Andrew Myers, and Dr. Craig Ravesloot recently published an article in the Journal of Rural Health titled “Transitory and Enduring Disability Among Urban and Rural People.” Dr. Sage and Myers are RTC:Rural Project Directors, Dr. Ward is the RTC:Rural Statistician, and Dr. Ravesloot is RTC:Rural Director and Research Advisor.

Part of RTC:Rural’s continued research on the geography and ecology of rural disability (see Ecology of Rural Disability and Geography and Rural Disability), this article examines how disability rates vary by age, gender, and race between rural and urban places. While there has been some recent research on the intersection of disability and rurality, there is a lack of research on disability across the life span in rural places, and few studies include a measure of how people move in and out of disability over time. Continue reading →

RTC:Rural presents at APHA annual conference on health equity

APHA 2018 Annual Meeting & Expo. San Diego, Nov. 10-14. Creating the Healthiest Nation: Health Equity NowRTC:Rural researchers recently traveled to San Diego, CA for the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting. The conference was from November 10 to 14, and theme was “Creating the Healthiest Nation: Health Equity Now.”

In attendance were RTC:Rural Director Dr. Catherine Ipsen, Director and Research Advisor Dr. Craig Ravesloot, Knowledge Broker Dr. Meg Ann Traci, and Project Directors Dr. Rayna Sage and Andrew Myers attended. Dr. Traci, Dr. Sage, and Myers gave a combined six presentations on Rural Institute and RTC:Rural research. Continue reading →