title: Assessing clinicians' consultation with people with profound learning disability: producing a rating scale.
abstract: This paper describes the development of a scale for assessing clinicians' 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 assessment 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Medicine, Ely Hospital, Cardiff, Wales.
authors.forename: M P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Kerr
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nolan
authors.forename: W I
authors.initials: WI
authors.lastname: Fraser
mesh_terms: D001794:Blood Pressure; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D008607:Intellectual Disability; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D015588:Observer Variation; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014743:Videotape Recording