Celebrating 100 years of learning disability nursing…and looking ahead

2019 marks 100 years since what we now call learning disability nursing (LDN) was officially recognised in the UK as a stand-alone field of the profession.

To celebrate its 100th birthday, the University’s LDN lecturers and students organised a commemorative event in which people who have an LD and experienced LD clinicians gathered at University of Northampton’s Waterside campus to look back on where LDN was a century ago, where it is now and the issues facing the profession and what the perfect LD nurse of the future should ‘look’ like.

Rachel Beckett, Senior Lecturer in Learning Disability Nursing, sums up a day that went well.

It’s not that often you get the chance to celebrate a centenary and can get together with people who share the same values, high esteem and passion for the profession of learning disability nursing.

It’s even less often you can then grasp the opportunity to step back and reflect on those past 100 years and think about where you want to be in the years or decades ahead.

We held our ‘Learning Disability Nursing turns 100’ event to celebrate the profession and reflect on the changes prompted by policy and service innovation.

Firstly, have our values changed and what are the career opportunities out there?

We also wanted to share and discuss our values and vision for LD nursing.

We wanted to hear about people’s professional journeys and their reflections of the impact of their role on people with LD lives and the wider community.

Finally, we wanted to showcase to our students the huge variety of career options available to them after they don mortar board and gowns and collect their well-deserved degrees.

At this point I’d like to pay credit to everyone else who helped make the event. I might be the one summing up the day but like everything in nursing, it really was a team effort.

Students, lecturers, practice partners and other University staff all pulled together to help set-up our photo booth, create the agenda, promote the day to stakeholders and create our ‘Build a nurse’ feature.

In multi-professional groups we discussed key aspects which will influence the role of the future nurse. This included how to embed the new NMC standards for clinical skills in education further into the learning disability nurse’s role. What roles and skills a future nurse needs and what information about learning disability various sectors of the wider community would benefit from knowing. This information is being evaluated for future use within our nursing curriculum.

The ethos in the room confirmed the central principle of person centred approaches, ensuring that people with learning disabilities know that they have control over decisions that impact on their lives and that people who work to support them are working to assist them to fully realise this autonomy.

So, did we achieve what we set out to do? I think we did…and then some!

Core themes and values of the profession were confirmed and innovation for a way forward was planned. It became increasingly apparent throughout the day how the profession has adapted to changes in policy, legislation and values along with increasing speculation of late about the future of our profession.

It was also clear from the evidence gathered that there has never been such a stronger need for learning disability nurses to assist with reducing the health inequalities of people with learning disabilities.

Students in particular gained from the experience, relishing the opportunity of being in the same room with seasoned clinicians and being inspired by their journeys.

Those clinicians also gained from talking with our students, seeing their professionalism, positivity and confidence and leaving the day assured that this high calibre of future nurses will keep the profession in safe hands.

At University of Northampton we pride ourselves on giving amazing support to our LD nurses – we have a strong LDN pathway here. We have an initiative that runs through our degree programme called Be Brilliant, meaning we do all we can to help our students aspire to and achieve brilliance during their studies and beyond.

We host Wellbeing Wednesday’s with activities and events designed to help students manage and maintain their physical and mental health and have a new Personal Academic Tutor system that supports their academic and clinical placement work.

As the smallest field of nursing and the smallest nursing team, we have the fortunate advantage of being more visible to students and really knowing the different cohorts. We are proud of our LDN education and our students but as a profession are naturally concerned about the national reduction of learning disability nurses being trained, despite the evidence highlighting the increased need for this professional role within community and care settings.

It has been said before that LD nurses aren’t made they are born and this was another thing that all of us picked up on. LD nursing that is already within our students; as educators, we help nurture and mould this, working very much the LD nursing student.

Given the vacancy rate for LD nurse – currently, it stands at around 16% of unfilled posts in England and Wales, which it has been anticipated could rise up to 30% over the next five years* – the challenge for educators is making sure we reach those people and help start them on the road to making a big difference. And Learning Disability Nursing at University of Northampton, as we saw at our recent birthday event, is well placed to meet that challenge.

Here’s to another 100 years!

See our Youtube video for students answering questions about what it means to be an LDN.

See our Facebook album for more photos from the event.

Are you a born LDN? See the University’s degree page for more.

*Health Education England figures, as reported in the Health Service Journal, June 2019.