Research underscores the critical contributions of disabled1 nurses whose lived experiences and unique perspectives enhance patient care, advance cultural concordance, and strengthen healthcare delivery (Marks & Sisirak, 2022). Despite this, disabled nursing students remain underrepresented in nursing education, and structural barriers—including interpersonal ableism, exclusionary technical standards, insufficient accommodations, and inaccessible didactic and clinical learning environments—continue to hinder their entry and success (Luckowski, 2016; Jamal-Eddine et al., 2024; Marks & Sisirak, 2022). While existing studies offer insight into individual experiences of ableism in nursing and localized interventions, nursing education as a discipline needs national, data-driven insights to inform policy and practice.
Sustainable systemic change requires a three-pronged approach:
National Data Collection: Establishing a quantitative and qualitative national dataset to capture disability representation, barriers, and outcomes in nursing education.
Association-Led Commitment to Data Standardization: Partnering with national nursing associations to create, collect, and maintain this dataset.
Collective Leadership: Engaging researchers, accrediting bodies, disability resource professionals (DRPs), critical disability scholar-activists, and disabled nursing students, faculty, and leaders—assuring inclusion of multiply marginalized voices—to analyze, interpret, publish, and disseminate findings that drive anti-ableist policy change.
Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Data for Policy and Practice
A data-driven approach is essential for understanding the systemic challenges disabled nursing students face. Qualitative research captures the lived experiences of disabled students, highlighting the exclusionary structural and interpersonal barriers that hinder their success, while quantitative data establishes foundational metrics—such as prevalence, representation, and disparities—to inform policy. Together, these insights can drive focused interventions that improve admission, retention, and graduation rates of disabled nursing students.
A recent paper illustrates how quantitative research findings can dialectically drive qualitative inquiry and action: the first quantitative study benchmarking disability representation in U.S. Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) programs found that 8.4% of students disclose disabilities (Jackson et al., 2025). Psychological disabilities were most frequently reported, while mobility and sensory disabilities cumulatively accounted for less than 1% of those disclosures. Additionally, this data identified a concerning gap in clinical accommodations as didactic supports are more commonly reported than clinical adjustments (Jackson et al., 2025). These findings raise urgent questions requiring qualitative exploration: Why is representation lower for mobility and sensory disabilities? How do systemic factors, such as faculty bias, exclusionary policies, or inaccessible practices impact a student’s likelihood of disclosing disabilities, seeking accommodations, or pursuing nursing education depending on the type of disability the student has? What resources or cultural shifts do nursing programs need in order to develop comprehensive clinical accommodations? And ultimately, what will allow us to move beyond accommodationist solutions to radically transform nursing through practices of design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020), collective accountability (Price, 2024), and radical access?
A national standardized dataset would allow for the identification of gaps in disability representation, accommodation practices, and institutional policies to effectively move from examining isolated nursing programs to examining the discipline of nursing education at large. Inclusion of disability in national datasets would also facilitate intersectional analyses, enabling researchers and policymakers to use sociodemographic characteristics to identify unique barriers for specific multiply marginalized communities and contexts (e.g., disabled women of color in doctoral programs) and develop precise interventions that address these multi-layered inequities. Beyond cross-sectional data, longitudinal tracking is necessary to assess trends, measure progress, and refine policies over time. Without the nursing profession’s commitment to consistent and comprehensive data collection, efforts to promote disability inclusion will remain fragmented and ineffective.
Partnering with National Nursing Associations
The most effective strategy for scaling disability data collection is through partnerships with national nursing associations. Organizations such as the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) have the capacity to standardize data collection and benchmark progress.
Key data points for national data collection across all nursing programs should include:
Disability prevalence by category alongside other sociodemographic characteristics.
Data on accommodation requests, approvals, and implementation as well as transparency on denials of accommodation to promote innovative practices of inclusivity.
Performance metrics, including retention and graduation rates, for disabled students as reflections of institutional commitment to success of marginalized students.
Institutional practices such as employing a specialized disability resource professional with awareness of clinical practice as well as training admissions committees and faculty on anti-ableist practices.
Nursing associations can play a pivotal role in integrating disability-related questions into existing student and institutional surveys. Additionally, professional nursing organizations can play a pivotal role in adapting nursing culture and policies to effectively respond to evolving national trends. By committing to national data collection, the nursing profession can track inequities, measure national and institutional progress, and recommend transformative policies and practices that foster inclusive learning environments.
Collective Leadership: Advancing Anti-Ableist Learning Environments
Data collection alone will not drive meaningful change—collective leadership with a shared commitment to anti-ableism is essential for cultivating both inclusion and belongingness in nursing education. Collective leadership fosters collaboration across institutions, ensures shared power in decision-making, and aligns interested parties toward the common goal of national disability data collection that can inform policy and cultural transformation.
While nursing associations are well-positioned to lead national data collection, the design, analysis, and dissemination of findings must be a collaborative effort. Research must be informed by disabled students and faculty, disability resource professionals, administrators, and national nursing leaders to ensure accuracy, mitigate bias, and produce actionable, disability-informed change.
To achieve this, nursing associations should establish research partnerships with disability-focused organizations. In medical education, collaborations between the DocsWithDisabilities Initiative and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) have led to significant advancements in disability inclusion through national data collection, policy recommendations, and disability inclusivity trainings. A growing initiative within nursing, the Access in Nursing (AIN) program has already taken critical steps by launching the first national disability benchmark study, building an interdisciplinary coalition of over 60 nursing education experts, and developing innovative resources that promote disability inclusion in nursing education.
Nursing programs can foster collective leadership in their own programs by:
Empowering Disabled Voices: Ensuring a diverse body of disabled students and faculty inform policy decisions through committees and task forces.
Training Faculty and Staff: Providing disabled-led education on disability consciousness, trainings on anti-ableism, approaches to accommodation implementation, and radical systems transformation to improve workplace sustainability for all nurses.
Building Disability Resource Professional Capacity: Strengthening institutional support for specialized disability resource professionals who are equipped with an understanding of clinical practice to innovate accommodations and systemic practices that can reduce barriers for disabled nursing students across disability type.
Promoting Cross-Sector Collaboration: Encouraging partnerships among educators, clinical preceptors, researchers, institutional leaders, learners, and critical disability scholar-activists to address barriers and disability inclusive action across the entire enterprise.
Robust Data and Collective Action for Meaningful Change
Medical education has demonstrated that robust quantitative and qualitative research—in partnership with associations and diverse research teams with lived experience of disability—drive systemic change. Nursing education must reinvent discipline-specific strategies to dismantle ableism, improve accessibility, and foster sustainable inclusion and belongingness. To achieve this goal, the nursing profession must commit to comprehensive qualitative and quantitative data collection supported by nursing associations. Finally, the nursing profession must embrace collective leadership to dismantle ableism through co-creation of evidence-based research, interventions, and policy changes.
Nursing education is at a pivotal moment. By embracing data-driven, evidence-based action and cross-institution commitment to change, we can identify and eliminate systemic barriers, foster diversity, and build a nursing workforce that reflects the communities it serves.
Acknowledgements:
Dr. Sabrina Jamal-Eddine’s work is funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, Administration for Community Living (grant #90ARCP0004), Advanced Training in Transnational and Community Engaged Scholarship to Improve Community Living and Participation of People with Disabilities, University of Illinois Chicago. The contents of this article do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. federal government.
Biographies
Karen Aul
Vanessa Cameron
Tess Carichner
Brandy Jackson
Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine
Lisa M. Meeks
Linda Morrow
Joy Patrick
Footnotes
This commentary intentionally employs identity-first language (i.e. disabled nurses) with a mixture of person-first language (i.e. nurses with disabilities) in alignment with disability justice and critical disability studies movements that work toward reclaiming disability as a neutral identity, similar to the ways in which identity-first language is used with race, sexuality, and gender.
Declarations of interest: none
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