Objective:

To characterize social risk factors among hospitalized adults with disabilities.

Approach:

• Design and setting: From June 2023 through April 2024, investigators screened adults hospitalized on general medicine services at a large urban academic medical center.
• Measures: Disability was self-reported across hearing, visual, mobility, cognition, learning, dressing/bathing, and communication domains, as well as needs for assistive devices or assistance with daily needs. Social-risk screening covered housing instability, food insecurity, and transportation barriers.
• Analysis: The analysis compared social-risk reporting by disability status and assessed associations between disability types and social-risk domains.

Key Findings:

• The final cohort included 335 patients; 222 (66.3%) reported at least one disability and 104 (31.0%) reported at least one social risk factor.
• Social risk factors were more common among patients with disability than among those without disability (37.8% vs. 17.7%; p ≤ .001).
• Among patients with disability, 25.2% reported transportation barriers, 20.8% food insecurity, and 13.1% housing instability.
• Transportation barriers were more frequent among patients with communication, visual, or dressing/bathing-related disabilities than among patients without each respective disability type.

Interpretation:

The authors report that disability and social risk factors frequently co-occurred in this hospitalized sample. They note that transportation barriers may be prevalent among patients with disabilities, while housing instability may be more concentrated in particular disability groups. The authors describe the findings as preliminary and state that larger, more diverse studies are needed to assess disability-related patterns in social risk factors.

Limitations:

• The sample lacked adequate power to support generalizability.
• Participation required English proficiency, the ability to complete a verbal survey, and orientation to person, place, and time, limiting who could participate.