id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
amwa-171	Towles, Jeanette	Reflections on Working as a Medical Writer with a Disability and How Medical Writers Can Be Disability Allies	2022	6	.pdf	application/pdf	4080	197	30	It is not meant to be a history on disability law or a comprehensive treatise on why people with disabilities are underemployed—other authors have covered those topics in great detail in other milieus, to incremental avail—but, rather, to raise awareness of potential challenges within the medical writing context and how navigating stakeholders’ assumptions about health circumstances can be as ardu- ous as managing the health condition itself. In fact, the majority of requested accommodations cost nothing to implement, with the rest costing only $500 per employee on average.3 Common accommodations in the medical writing field may include more obvious ones like equip- ment requests (adjustable height desks, headsets), soft- ware (speech recognition, closed captioning), or flexible schedule, but there may be other less obvious ones such as need for accompanying service animals, a quiet or lighted workspace, a space with certain temperature parameters, or need for a color-coded filing system.12 Given that dis- ability inclusion is also gaining ground as an important topic for corporate responsibility and investors, with more CEOs every day signing onto pledges like “Investors are ‘IN’” and “CEOs are ‘IN’” and using tools like the Disability Equality Index, a benchmarking tool that helps companies build a roadmap of measurable actions that they can take to achieve disability inclusion and equality it is likely that most Boards of Directors would be supportive of and tout any successes you have had making your medical writing team more inclusive.5,13,14 This index is scored on a scale of 0 to 100 points, with 80 and above achieving a title of “Best Places to Work for Disability Inclusion,” and measures based on answers and supporting documentation for the current year (or, for some questions, a recall of 1 year) the weighted domains of culture and leadership, enterprise-wide access, employment practices, accommodations, and supplier diversity, as well as the nonweighted domain of non-US operations.	cache/amwa-171.pdf	txt/amwa-171.txt