Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Dr Craig Escudé of IntellectAbility On How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Have a Disability
An Interview With Eric Pines
You are never really an expert. Always keep learning and have the humility to understand that there are people who always know more and also know less. You can learn from everyone, and you can teach others as well.
As we all know, over the past several years there has been a great deal of discussion about inclusion and diversity in the workplace. One aspect of inclusion that is not discussed enough, is how businesses can be inclusive of people with disabilities. We know that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. What exactly does this look like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? To address these questions, we are talking to successful business leaders who can share stories and insights from their experience about the “How Businesses Make Accommodations For Customers and Employees Who Are Disabled “.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Craig Escudé.
Dr. Craig Escudé is a board-certified Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians and one of the very few Fellows of the American Academy of Developmental Medicine. He is also the president of Health Risk Screening, Inc. He served as medical director of Hudspeth Regional Center in Mississippi and is the founder of DETECT, the Developmental Evaluation, Training and Educational Consultative Team of Mississippi. He has more than 20 years of clinical experience providing medical care for people with IDD and complex medical conditions and is the author of “Clinical Pearls in IDD Healthcare” and the “Curriculum in IDD Healthcare.”
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you ended up where you are?
After I finished my family practice residency in 1995, I began working in a Federally Qualified Health Center doing regular family practice. I decided to change my career in 1997 after working at a large state mental hospital in Mississippi, providing medical care for people receiving mental health services. I began working there full-time and then also began working at an Intermediate Care Facility for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). I’d found my calling. What was interesting is that I learned very quickly how ill-prepared I was to provide healthcare to people with IDD. Over the next few years, I learned things “the hard way” from nurses and other staff members who had been working there much longer than I had. I realized there was a great need to educate healthcare providers and supporters of people with IDD. I developed a program in Mississippi to provide training and education to healthcare providers in the state. In 2018, I decided to retire from a clinical practice and began working with IntellectAbility because my personal mission aligned so well with the company’s. Now, I work full time to develop products and training and teach clinicians, direct support professionals, nurses, and others in the field of support and services for people with IDD how to identify commonly missed health problems and improve health equity for people with IDD across the country.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Creativity — Achieving goals, either personal or professional, requires creative skills. Some may call it being a dreamer or thinking outside of the box, but imagining new products, new pathways, or different approaches to solving problems requires an artistic, creative mindset.
Perseverance — We frequently come across roadblocks when working towards our goals. It might be funding, it might be personnel, or something else. If we stop at every roadblock we see, we’d struggle to make it anywhere. We must consider ways to go around, over, or under that block. In my experience, there’s always a way.
People skills — Life is about relationships. Take time to build relationships with people no matter where they are in life. Treat people with respect and kindness, which will return to you in your work and personal lives. Be competent and deliver what you say you will. People do business with each other because they feel comfortable, confident, and trust the person, and that stems much more from the relationships that are built than the actual products and services.
Can you share a story about one of your greatest work-related struggles? Can you share what you did to overcome it?
There was a company that I was eager to do business with. Their representative didn’t care to give me or any of my colleagues the time of day. He wasn’t rude, but he didn’t understand the value of what we could provide for them due to his prior experience when we were much smaller. I saw him at conference after conference and continued with casual small talk and never talked about business. There was a dinner where we just happened to be seated together. We really got to know each other as people. At the next conference, I was introduced to his whole team, and now we have an excellent business relationship. And what’s great about it is that it’s important work that changes people’s lives for the better. Perseverance and people skills made that possible. By the way, it only took about five years!
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) face health disparities like few other groups. Our company, IntellectAbility, is all about improving health, reducing health risks, and improving the quality of life for people with IDD. Expanding the use of our Health Risk Screening Tool and fortifying it with new features is always at the forefront of what we do. We are developing new eLearning courses that teach supporters of people with IDD about the most common preventable causes of illness and death and empower them with skills to prevent them. One of our most exciting courses in the Curriculum in IDD Healthcare is used to teach practicing physicians, medical students, and other health professionals about how to provide healthcare to people with IDD in an effective way. Our person-centered training helps ensure that people with IDD have a say in their own lives, balancing what is best for the person with what the person wants in their own life. Additionally, as more people with IDD are being served by Managed Care Organizations, we are fostering relationships with them to assist them in their support of people’s health as well as helping to ensure they get the services they need from people who are trained to identify and prevent poor health outcomes. I’d say these are all pretty exciting. We’re improving health for people, and our work reduces health disparities for some of America’s most at-risk.
Fantastic. Let’s now shift to our discussion about inclusion. Can you tell our readers a bit about your experience working with initiatives to promote Diversity and Inclusion? Can you share a story with us?
We hear so much about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), but the group that is often left out of this discussion is people with IDD. There is intersectionality between this group and all other groups, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and others, which further amplifies the need to include them in DEI efforts. Inclusion means seeing people with IDD like anyone else and providing opportunities for them to experience the same joys and challenges that everyone faces. People with IDD want to work, they want to have natural friends who are not paid workers, and they want to be able to access healthcare from clinicians with competence and training to be able to meet their needs. These aren’t special considerations. They are the same things that everyone else wants. At IntellectAbility, we strive to improve health-related supports and services, including educating clinicians and other supporters so that people have an equal chance at attaining good health. That’s a human right.
This may be obvious to you, but it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you articulate to our readers a few reasons why it is so important for a business or organization to have an inclusive work culture?
When any group is excluded from a workplace, the company suffers. They lose the opportunity to gain a potentially excellent employee because that person may not feel comfortable working in that environment. Companies should not ask, “What accommodations do we have to make for this person to work here?” but “What are we losing by not having a place where everyone can work comfortably?”
The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires businesses to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what this looks like in practice? What exactly are reasonable accommodations? Can you please share a few examples?
Since I am a physician, let’s look at it from a medical practice standpoint.
The ADA requires healthcare entities to provide full and equal access for people with disabilities through reasonable modifications of policies, practices, and procedures, effective communication, and accessible facilities. Examples include:
- Allowing a companion to assist a person with a mobility disability when positioning the patient for a radiology scan.
- Allowing additional time to explain care to a patient with an intellectual disability.
- Providing a qualified reader for written information and providing instructions and medication management in large print.
- Having accessible examination tables, imaging machines, and scales.
- Having wheelchair-accessible bathrooms with clear turning space, grab bars, and accessible sinks.
Aside from what is legally required, what are some best practices that can make a business place feel more welcoming and inclusive of people with disabilities? If you can, please share a few examples.
It’s important to educate staff members about people with disabilities and provide an understanding of the importance of seeing them as people first. People with disabilities want the same things that we all want out of life and mostly want to be treated like everyone else. I think understanding this principle first and permeating it through the fabric of a business is an excellent step towards inclusivity.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started My Career”?
- You are never really an expert. Always keep learning and have the humility to understand that there are people who always know more and also know less. You can learn from everyone, and you can teach others as well.
- Sometimes lessons come from people you think are the least likely to teach you anything. I learned much from people who are not able to use words to communicate. Learning to recognize small changes in people’s way of interacting with others has made me a better clinician.
- The more respected you are in your field, the more important attributes like kindness, humility, and generosity become. Think about it. We often expect well-known people not to give us the time of day. But when they do, it leaves a lasting and positive impression.
- Never presume incompetence. Many people with IDD have a much greater understanding of the world around them than we give them credit for. Talk to people and get to know them, and I believe you’ll find this is true.
- Our physical and mental health are connected. Never treat one without the other. Medical diagnoses often affect our minds and emotions, and many emotional stressors and mental health conditions can affect our physical bodies. Recognizing these connections is imperative to treating the whole person.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
“Everyone’s an expert at something. You just have to know where to look.” I’ve learned many valuable lessons and insights from people I thought would be the least likely to teach me anything. Opening our minds to learning from any and everyone makes us better in the long run.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I would ask that people see people with IDD as PEOPLE first. Recognize them as fellow travelers in the world seeking health, happiness, joy, satisfaction, equity, and to be valuable to others as much as anyone else.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Learn more about our work at IntellectAbility in supporting those who support people with IDD to improve health at ReplacingRisk.com.
My LinkedIn profile can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-escude-md-faafp-faadm-40b5646/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.
While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.
Mr. Pines has also served as a mediator for numerous federal agencies including serving a year as the Library of Congress’ in-house EEO Mediator. He has also served as an expert witness in federal court for federal employee matters. He has also worked as an EEO technical writer drafting hundreds of Final Agency Decisions for the federal sector.
Mr. Pines’ firm is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has offices in Baltimore, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia. His first passion is his wife and five children. He plays classical and rock guitar and enjoys playing ice hockey, running, and biking. Please visit his websites at www.pinesfederal.com and www.toughinjurylawyers.com. He can also be reached at eric@pinesfederal.com.
Disability Inclusion In The Workplace: Dr Craig Escudé of IntellectAbility On How Businesses Make… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.