A Shift in Perspective: Sonoran Center Trainee Alum Shares Her Experience in the Certificate Program

The Sonoran Center’s Undergraduate Certificate in Developmental Disabilities gives UArizona students the opportunity to take a deep dive into the Disability community: the unique experience, culture, and best practices from a healthcare perspective. It explores disability from a historical, cultural, and social perspective and gives students the chance to develop and apply their skills in an interdisciplinary team. After students graduate, they have a competitive edge for positions in organizations that work for and with individuals with developmental disabilities. 

Corinne Winsten is a current medical student at the UArizona College of Medicine – Phoenix who participated in the program from 2019 through 2020. We caught up with her to reflect on her time in the program, see how the program has helped her, and find out what’s next for her. 

“Even though at the time I wasn’t fully sold on medical school yet, I did know that I wanted to work with the disability community in some capacity. I wasn't sure what that was yet. The program really helped me do that,” Winsten said.

The program is a series of courses, a workshop, and a research experience, taking place over roughly one year. The core course is called Disability Perspectives: Research, Policy, and Practice while some of the additional courses include Biology in Public Health Research and Practice, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and Arts and Community Health. 

“The most impactful part of the program, for me, was the perspective shift from the medical to the social model,” Winsten said. 

The medical and social models of disability are different ways of conceptualizing what ‘disability’ means and how it operates in society. Under the medical model, there is a set of actions that people are presumed to be able to do, and any deviation from this constitutes a deficit, and a reduction in quality of life. This leads to efforts to ‘correct’ the disability on an individual level via medical intervention. The social model, by contrast, holds that ‘disability’ is a condition created by a lack of accommodations, and that living a fulfilling life is not predicated on the ability to do certain activities. Many in the disability community prefer this model, because it does not regard people with disabilities as ‘broken’ and places the onus on society to be more accessible for everyone. 

“The environment is often what limits people. It’s not a problem within an individual,” Winsten said of this shift in perspective. “In medicine we’re taught about disability in a way that says there’s something wrong with a person and that’s supposed to be fixed by medicine. I love that the program kind of nipped that in the bud for me before I went to medical school so that I could be prepared to think about that in a different way.”

Even people who have dedicated their lives to the medical profession can sometimes be oblivious to how disabilities can affect a person’s experience. 

“Now I’m in medical school and I’m living firsthand what I was warned about in the Sonoran Center program about the medical model of disability versus the social model and how medicine in general really lets people down who have disabilities, specifically intellectual/developmental disabilities.” Winsten said. “I feel very lucky I had that exposure and training through the Sonoran Center program, because it prepared me with that perspective and gave me the tools to unpack some of the, honestly, medical ableism I was being inadvertently taught at school.”

For example, Winston noticed that despite the numerous interest groups for people of different demographics and specialties, there was no interest group for people with disabilities. Discovering this, she decided to start her own: 

“I realized that there wasn’t any for disability health or disability advocacy, and that was a big hole in our student culture and the administration as whole. Because of what I’d learned in the program, I felt confident setting that up.”

Winsten also said that she feels more assured in calling out medical ableism among her peers, colleagues, and even professors. 

“Because I was in the program and had that exposure and training, I’ve been primed to notice things that some of my peers, and even some of my professors, aren’t primed to notice. I’ve been in the privileged position to kind of point those things out and give other people those ‘a-ha!’ moments. Things like, ‘Even if you think your patient is non-verbal, talk to them. Engage with them. Make eye contact. They are your patient, not the caregiver that’s with them,’”

The program helped Winsten challenge some of her own notions about what life with a disability can be like. 

“Something I’ve learned in the program that really stuck with me and I think was especially helpful before going into medical school: not assuming anything about a person’s life just because what you may already know about the disability that they have. Because you wouldn’t do that for other people,” Winsten said. “You don’t assume everything about what a person can or can’t do because of one thing you know about them. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I think even just planting that seed can make a huge difference in the way that people treat their patients,” she added.

When asked about experiences or events from the program that meant the most to her, Winsten recalled the time a pediatric physician shared his experience with one of her classes: 

“He was talking about how it’s so important as a physician to have this background and training for when you’re having conversations with families and patients with developmental disabilities. When you’re in that position as a healthcare provider, people really listen to and trust what you’re saying. If you’re setting the tone of the conversation in a doom-and-gloom, deficit angle, people really take that to heart. It impacts them not only in that moment but for the rest of their lives. If you have more of a positive outlook and focus on what people can do, that’s going to be the impactful part of that meeting. It’s the importance of setting high expectations for people, and not writing people off because of what you learned in your medical textbooks; because those textbooks don’t talk about what people can do, they really only talk about what limitations people might have.”

The program offers the opportunity to collaborate with peers from a wide range of fields. For Corinne, this experience with interprofessional cooperation allowed her to look at her own work in a new way. Ultimately, she feels it was a crucial part of the experience.  

“I remember in the first year together it was nice to work with people who had different goals. There were lots of pre-speech pathology students and nursing students, and that was my first introduction to working on an interprofessional team. Up until I started my rotations I was basically only interacting with medical students,” Winsten described. “So, I liked that there was the opportunity to get more peoples’ perspectives. I learned a lot from my fellow trainees - just as much from them by speaking with them and working with them and learning about their experience as I did from the lectures.”

Looking ahead, Winsten says the program was an influence on her decision to center disability medicine as a physician. 

“I’m not fully set on a specialty yet, but I want to center people with developmental disabilities specifically in my practice. I also really like rural medicine. I used to think I was going to have to pick one - rural medicine or disability medicine - but I realized that’s not the case and I can do both. I don’t know what I was thinking - people with disabilities live everywhere!” Winsten said.

She continued, “I think that they’re really left behind in a lot of parts of society. It makes me really upset. I want my practice to run differently.”

Like the knowledge and experience she gained from the program, Corinne says the connections she made will stick with her throughout her career. In her time in the program, she met peers and mentors who each taught her something unique and special.

“Even after we graduate as trainees, we’re still a part of the [Sonoran Center] family. We can always reach out and use the organization as a resource. I remember when I was setting up the disability interest group, I reached out first and asked what kind of resources to use, and contact info for anyone that could help me. I felt very supported in that, too,” Winsten explained. “Remembering that I have this large network of resources and other people to rely on when I have questions as I continue learning will be really useful - probably forever, because there’s always more things to learn and different perspectives to integrate.”  

When asked what she would say to someone considering participating in the program, Winsten replied: 

“Even if you don’t know if you want a job that centers people with developmental disabilities, it’s still such a great learning experience. I can’t think of a single downside. I feel like I can guarantee you’re going to leave the program feeling more prepared. You’re going to leave the program with a different perspective on the world as a whole, and I know that sounds dramatic but it’s really how I felt. You’re going to feel more prepared to advocate not just for people with developmental disabilities, but for anyone.”