Human beings are social creatures and need social connections to thrive in society. I observed low social connectedness amongst the students with disabilities in my high school and wanted to do more research on the cause of this occurrence. In my literary analysis and proposal, I highlight the effects social isolation and loneliness have on the well-being of people. While concluding that negative health effects come from low social connection, I researched the prevalence of low social connection amongst the disabled population and found that although low social connectedness can impact anyone, those with disabilities experience more low social connectedness than those without disabilities. I then analyzed ways in which low social connection can be addressed and focused on measuring social isolation and loneliness as indicators of low connectedness. I proposed a promising mentorship program intervention for my chosen population, young adults with disabilities, to help them increase social connection. This proposal may be adapted for use with any population. My goal for this program is to help increase social connection, promote societal support, and increase self-esteem and knowledge of their desired career and life skills as they transition into adult roles. Furthermore, I hope this paper may help spread awareness and get society to think of ways interventions to promote social connectedness can be implemented for people, like young adults with disabilities, who experience low social connectedness.

This work is a mixed-methods study performed to evaluate the variance in patients’ hospital experiences at different stages of life. A survey of patients’ personal experience was designed based on information on healthcare practice from peer-reviewed journals and concepts from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2020). This study examined differences in how patients perceive memories of the hospital at the time of admission to the perception of their memories in the present day. The strength of association between past perceptions of overall experience with various aspects of the hospital experience was analyzed by calculating eta. The percent of variance in perception of experience that is explained by each aspect of the experience was then calculated by eta squared. Results were separated by age group at the time of admission to determine factors most likely to affect each group’s experience. Age groups 10 years and younger and 11-14 years were both concerned with the atmosphere of the hospital. All groups complained about their quality of sleep and the quality of the food, however, a majority of the complaints came from age groups 15-17 years and 18-21 years. The four age groups from 22-35+ years did not have enough participants to draw age specific conclusions by themselves and were therefore combined into one group, 22+ years. The 22+ years age group complained the most about noise, they complained about day noise in addition to night noise.