Health professional students must be equipped with the skills necessary to interact with patients. Effective interpersonal skills are difficult to both learn and teach, requiring development, practise and evaluation in both educational and clinical settings. In professions such as physiotherapy, traditional approaches to teaching these skills have encompassed clinical modelling, and stand-alone didactic teaching of the theory behind communication. These provide limited opportunity for students to practise and receive feedback on their interpersonal and communication skills. This paper describes the implementation of an experiential small group learning approach in an undergraduate physiotherapy program and discusses outcomes. Implications for practice are that: experientially based small group learning with opportunities for practise, reflection, self-evaluation and feedback, can improve students' confidence and interpersonal skills; consistent and scaffolded participation in experiential learning opportunities and assessment of this participation across the program is key to this approach. Interpersonal skills remain a challenge for new graduates; support and mentoring in this domain by supervisors may enhance the transition to work.Health professional education programs are now introducing more explicit teaching and assessment of interpersonal and communication skills under the banner of "professional skills". Gibson and Molloy (2012) indicated newly graduated health professionals have "a greater need for professional skill development, and assessment, within the health professions". Specific to physiotherapy, Ajjawi & Higgs (2008) describe interpersonal skills, including communication, collaboration and critical self-evaluation, as important skills and attributes which need to be explicitly included in physiotherapy programs if we are to better prepare students for employment. Evidence indicates it is important that students are motivated to change and develop their communication skills, and that the training should be experientially based and include formative feedback (Parry & Brown, 2009, p. 298).

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