Deaf-Led Sign Language Course Shifts Medical Students’ Perspectives

Undergraduate medical students who completed a student-selected component in deaf insights and British Sign Language at Imperial College London described having their assumptions challenged and their perspectives changed, according to a qualitative evaluation published in BMC Medical Education. Across three cohorts running between 2025 and 2026, forty Year 3 students took the course, which was co-developed and co-delivered with a deaf awareness trainer and deaf insights advocate who is also a deaf doctor and who shared lived experiences of deaf culture, healthcare and patient journeys. The course comprised three weekly sessions of three hours each, focusing on health equity, communication and reflective practice.

Deaf people experience well-documented healthcare inequities, and the study's authors note that limited deaf insights and specialist communication skills training in medical education contributes to these disparities. Evidence suggests that training in deaf insights and exposure to deaf culture and communication styles can improve students' communication skills and understanding of deaf culture, yet such content remains uncommon in undergraduate medical curricula. The Imperial team set out to design and evaluate a course that could be embedded within an existing programme as a student-selected component, with deaf expertise built into both its planning and its delivery.

To evaluate the course, the researchers used an interpretivist qualitative approach combining a dyadic interview with an online survey, analysing the data thematically with transformative learning theory as a sensitising lens. Students reported gaining a new understanding of deaf culture alongside a recognition of the healthcare barriers and inequities faced by deaf people. They also described a perceived increase in their confidence in communicating with deaf people.

In the researchers' analysis, this learning appeared to have been facilitated by the co-design of the course, its co-delivery, and the opportunity for students to interact directly with deaf trainers and advocates rather than learning about deaf experiences second-hand. A notable pattern in the findings was what students intended to do with their new understanding. Participants reflected on their learning during group discussions and described intentions to act on these insights by changing their own practice and by educating others, with many hoping to act as advocates for deaf people in their future careers.

The significance of the delivery model runs through the findings. Because the component was co-created with a deaf trainer and advocate, students encountered deaf expertise and lived experience directly rather than through second-hand accounts, and the researchers link this direct interaction to the learning students described. The course was also deliberately structured as a student-selected component, meaning it could sit within an existing undergraduate programme without requiring wholesale curriculum redesign, an arrangement the authors suggest may be practical for other institutions considering similar training.

Because this was a qualitative study of self-reported experiences and perceptions across a single institution's cohorts, the findings describe what students said they learned and how they said they changed, rather than measuring objective changes in clinical behaviour or patient outcomes. The study captured the perspectives of the forty students who completed the component across the three cohorts, and the authors frame their conclusions in terms of the features observed in students' accounts rather than as demonstrated effects on practice. The study's conclusion is deliberately scoped to what the data can support: co-creation and co-delivery of a deaf insights and British Sign Language component with deaf trainers and advocates shows features consistent with the initial stages of transformative learning occurring in undergraduate medical students.

The authors suggest that their approach and findings may be of interest to other institutions developing similar training, and that wider adoption of this model could help improve students' confidence and their understanding of how to meet the needs of deaf people. They add that such improvements may, in turn, contribute to improving health equity for deaf individuals, positioning deaf-led curriculum design as a practical route for embedding deaf awareness into mainstream medical education rather than leaving it to the initiative of individual students. For medical schools weighing how to address communication skills training, the Imperial evaluation offers a worked example of what a small, co-delivered component can look like in practice, and of the kinds of learning students reported when deaf trainers and advocates led the teaching themselves.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of undergraduate medical students’ experiences, perceptions and learning from a deaf insights and British Sign Language course: a qualitative study

Article Title: Evaluation of undergraduate medical students’ experiences, perceptions and learning from a deaf insights and British Sign Language course: a qualitative study

Article References: Scott, K., Neve, G., Wilcock, N., & Powell, S. (2026). Evaluation of undergraduate medical students’ experiences, perceptions and learning from a deaf insights and British Sign Language course: a qualitative study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10639-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10639-3

Keywords: Evaluation, undergraduate, medical, students, experiences, perceptions, learning, deaf, insights, British, Sign, Language