Communication skills training for healthcare students working with people with intellectual disabilities

Effective communication skills are essential for all healthcare professionals. Specialist teaching on communicating with people with intellectual disabilities is often lacking, resulting in poorer healthcare and worse outcomes than in the general population. Working with professionally trained actors with intellectual disabilities, we developed an interprofessional workshop that sought to provide authentic communication skills training to enable healthcare students from various disciplines to communicate effectively with patients of all abilities. In a survey, students reported that they found the workshops rewarding and confidence-building, and that they learnt more about the roles of their interprofessional colleagues