Act now or learning disability nursing disappears as a profession
Successive Learning from Lives and Deaths (LeDeR) reports underline the fact that investment in learning disability nursing to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities is desperately needed and the NHS and higher education institutions need to acknowledge that
Investment in learning disability nursing is needed to save the profession and improve the lives of people living with learning disabilities
The potential collapse of learning disability as a field of nursing practice is shaping too much of the narrative about the future of the profession and yet, seemingly, not enough to save it.
Learning Disability Practice editor Christine Walker recently shared a glaring reminder of the future of the specialty. This future will be barren if action to address concerns about the stark decline in the numbers of learning disability nurses is slow or lacks impact. Even more so if there is no action at all.
Can you imagine a future without this field of nursing?
The move from commissioned education dealt a huge blow to learning disability nursing as a profession with higher education institutions (HEIs), as businesses, now focusing on programmes with larger numbers of students – often adult nursing – because they are more commercially viable.
The 21st-century nurse is being transformed from a task-oriented worker to an autonomous critical thinker; a vital, influential member of the interdisciplinary healthcare team, capable of meeting the complex challenges of modern healthcare. However, we are also educating students to be leaders for all of society, which includes those living with a learning disability.
‘Poor care has been happening for years and, despite investment to prevent such awful care, it continues’
Ending university programmes has a substantial impact on all nursing students’ experiences of learning and subsequently on those living with a learning disability, their families, carers and all healthcare provision.
Do we want to perpetuate substandard care – what Sara Ryan describes as ‘erasure and social murder’?
Pressing need for a complete workforce and investment in learning disability nursing
Poor care has been happening for years and, despite investment to prevent such awful care, it continues.
Discussion about the role of the learning disability nurse has been forming a narrative for as long as I have been registered. Disappointment about why the care of people with learning disabilities has not improved went a long time ago for me, and has been replaced with infuriation that the numbers of learning disability nurses are so far into decline.
We need acknowledgement from the NHS and HEIs that there is a need for a complete workforce and investment in learning disability nursing to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities raised time after time in successive LeDeR reports.
With more learning disability nurses there will be better health outcomes and people with learning disabilities can be enabled to live the kind of life they may seek – just an ordinary life.
Further information
- Ryan S (2026) Critical Health and Learning Disabilities: An Exploration of Erasure and Social Murder. Routledge, Oxon.
- King’s College London (2026) Learning from Lives and Deaths – people with a learning disability and autistic people (LeDeR).
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