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Lack of disability-competent health care contributes to inequitable health outcomes for the largest minoritized population in the world: persons with disabilities. Health care professionals hold implicit and explicit bias against disabled people and report receiving inadequate disability training. While disability competence establishes a baseline standard of care, health professional educators must prepare a disability conscious workforce by challenging ableist assumptions and promoting holistic understanding of persons with disabilities. Future clinicians must recognize disability as an aspect of diversity, express respect for disabled patients, and demonstrate flexibility about how to care for disabled patients' needs. These skills are currently undervalued in medical training, specifically. This article describes how integrating disability consciousness into health professions training can improve health equity for patients with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans with disabilities represent the largest historically underserved and marginalized health disparity population in the United States. This perspective piece will raise the awareness of physical therapy faculty and clinicians on gaps in health care provider knowledge about disability and provide actionable strategies, frameworks, and resources available to improve disability competence to make changes in clinical education and practice. In this perspective piece, 3 contributions are made. First, health disparities experienced by Americans with disabilities as a result of health care providers' biased assumptions about disability and lack of disability competence are described through an in-depth illustration of lived experiences of people with disabilities. Second, a discussion of disability competence in physical therapist education is provided. Finally, critical and evidence-based insights and actionable frameworks and resources to address disability competence training gaps and to promote anti-ableist practice are provided., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Physical Therapy Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)