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People with intellectual disabilities are high users of acute hospital care. Given their varied and often complex health-care needs, they often experience health inequalities and inequities, contributing to poorer health outcomes. As nurses are the largest health-care workforce with a patient-facing role, they have an important responsibility in meeting this populations health needs. The purpose of this paper is to explore key issues relating to the role nurses play in providing equitable health care for people with intellectual disabilities.

This service feature draws upon relevant literature to examine key contextual issues highlighting the importance of nurses in providing equitable health care for people with intellectual disabilities.

The findings from this service feature highlight the importance of nurses taking a leadership role in advocating for, and actively supporting the health needs of people with intellectual disabilities. Nurses’ leadership role, along with implementing reasonable adjustments, should be underpinned by education and training relating to the bespoke health needs of people with intellectual disabilities. This should help nurses promote the health and well-being of this population.

Addressing this populations health needs is a collective responsibility of all nurses. There are many examples of how nurses can be supported through policy, education, training and advocacy and this needs to be considered by key stakeholders and addressed as a matter of priority.

One of the nine thought provoking essays assembled by Peter Vergo in the recently published The New Museology (Reaktan Books, ISBN 0 948 462 035 hardback, ISBN 0 948 462 043 paperback) is “The Quality of Visitors' Experiences in Art Museums” in which Philip Wright discusses the lack of awareness among museum personnel of what exactly their institutions are doing, and indeed should do, in a period when “films, television, video and pop access photography have inevitably altered, if not actually undermined the hierarchy of images that museums aim to display”. Few curators have had professional surveys of their audience undertaken, some have dismissed colleagues' changes as pandering to commercialisation, and invest in sophisticated technology and displays in such a way as to distract from the integrity of the objects in their care.