Reforming medical training for psychiatry of intellectual disability: from margins to mandate

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.