ORCID
- Rohit Shankar: 0000-0002-1183-6933
Abstract
In its 2025 medical training review, National Health Service (NHS) England highlighted the urgent need to modernise postgraduate medical education in England to meet NHS population needs while supporting doctors’ professional aspirations. The psychiatry of intellectual disability, a subspecialty marked by declining recruitment, uneven service provision and limited research capacity, provides a critical test case for these reforms. This article applies the 11 recommendations from the review to doctors training in this subspecialty. Drawing on recent evidence, it advocates for equitable, flexible and academically grounded reforms that embed psychiatry of intellectual disability within mainstream medical education, workforce planning and national health policy transformation.
DOI Link
Publication Date
2026-02-27
Publication Title
BJPsych Bulletin
ISSN
2056-4694
Acceptance Date
2026-01-01
Deposit Date
2026-02-27
Funding
This study received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Keywords
Intellectual disability, education, human rights, neurodevelopmental disorders, patients and service users, training
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
First Page
1
Last Page
5
Recommended Citation
Shankar, R. (2026) 'Reforming medical training for psychiatry of intellectual disability: from margins to mandate', BJPsych Bulletin, , pp. 1-5. Available at: 10.1192/bjb.2026.10221
