People with disabilities are often viewed with a perspective that minimizes all other aspects of their life, according to Andrea Dalzell, MSN, RN, even by nurses and other health care professionals. As an ED nurse who uses a wheelchair full time, Dalzell has experienced both sides of these types of encounters. At Emergency Nursing 2024, she presented a vision for how nurses can help challenge health care’s view of disability and help empower patients with disabilities.
Andrea Dalzell, now known as The Seated Nurse, was the first registered nurse using a wheelchair full time in New York.
Dalzell was diagnosed with transverse myelitis at age 5 and was using a wheelchair full time by age 12. She felt that the nurses and others who worked with her growing up saw her as “wheelchair bound” — a term she says was even used in her official diagnosis documentation. “Bound to what?,” she said. “We need to change that narrative, because I never understood that. My wheels gave me freedom!”
Dalzell said she wanted to be a nurse so that she could bring that hopeful perspective to others. She went on to become the first RN in a wheelchair in the state of New York, working the front-lines in the ICU during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of 2023, 1.3 billion people worldwide claimed to have a disability, according to the World Health Organization. What constitutes a disability can also vary greatly, said Dalzell, from needing glasses to see to being smaller in size, and everything in between. This makes it more important than ever, she said, to ensure that nurses and other health care professionals have the proper perspective when interacting with their patients.
Dalzell noted that it’s especially important for ED nurses to encourage their patients without talking down to them because nurses are usually the first to interact with a patient when they come in. She said that if that first impression isn’t handled properly, by the time the physician or other staff see the patient, it may be too late to save the encounter. “That’s your magic — to say that they’re supported,” said Dalzell. “We have the power, not the physicians.” She said that one way to reframe the interaction is to turn it around: “If you were given that diagnosis, how would you want it to be presented?” she told session attendees.
She added that the harm done to patients with disabilities may not always be intentional either. Even telling the person with the disability that they are “inspiring” — a declaration that may seem like a compliment — can be perceived by the recipient as a reduction of anything else they’ve done in their life, according to Dalzell.
“Remember when you’re talking to that patient, in that moment when they’re at their most vulnerable — that is not the end of their story,” Dalzell said. “Your magic allows them to go on and see a future for themselves that they might not have been able to see previously.”