Assessing clinicians' consultation with people with profound learning disability: producing a rating scale

This paper describes the development of a scale for assessing clitiicians’ communication with people with profound learning disability. Four psychiatrists and four nurses were assessed completing three simple non-invasive clinical procedures—blood pressure, pulse and axillary temperature—with people with profound learning disability. Videotaped assessmetit of consultations was performed by three experienced speech and language therapists using a previously designed scale for analysing encounters with people with mild learning disability. This led to the production of a new scale specifically for people with profound learning disability. A significant inter-rater reliability was found between the three speech therapists for total scores (rater a-b, corr = 0·654, P= 0·006; rater a–c, corr = 0·795, P= 0·0001: rater b–c, corr = 0·673, P = 0·004). Significant reliability between raters was also found for the subsections of verbal behaviour and non-verbal behaviour.