Learning Disability week | “It took me 47 years to find Learning Disability Nursing”

Claire Welch is studying BSc (Hons) Nursing (Learning Disabilities). For Learning Disability week, she tells us how she found her ‘calling’ within this branch of nursing.

“On a particularly hot Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1976, seven-year-old me decided that I wanted to become a nurse. I was wandering around the corridors of the Royal Cornwall Hospital while my mum ran a conference. My job at conferences was to help with pouring tea and offering cakes and biscuits. It wasn’t quite teatime, although the cups were out and the urns were on, so while the latest presentations were underway, I was free to roam.

I spent quite a bit of time within the confines of the hospital, where my mum worked in Haematology, but I quite enjoyed it on Sundays when she attended conferences. I explored the teaching rooms, but one was my favourite. The skeleton ‘in the closet’ hung on its stand the way it always did. I took time to marvel at it. I was fascinated. I always came to look but, more than that, I loved the smell of wood, paper, and cleanliness that the teaching room offered. It was a space I knew I wanted to study in. A place I felt at home.

When I was about nine, we moved house and had a new neighbour who, having suffered from Polio, was wheelchair-bound. I spent many hours helping out and learnt about hoists running from the high toilet, over the bath, and into her bedroom, making beds with hospital corners, and adaptations including her lowered kitchen units.

Life didn’t take me to my treasured teaching room with the skeleton in the closet. I’d been longing to tell Mum I wanted to be a nurse (the feeling never left me), but I didn’t pluck up the courage, and I went to London to study at a music conservatoire. After that came a career in publishing, marriage, and three boys. My time really wasn’t my own for many years.

When my Dad died of Covid, I decided life is too short. I trekked the Himalayas for charity and began researching nursing degrees. I applied to USW and, when the course started, I loved it.

When I was offered a learning disability placement, I jumped at it. Having very little knowledge of learning disability nursing I was slightly apprehensive on my first day. I really shouldn’t have worried, the team were extremely welcoming, passionate, and eager to explain. My supervisor was fantastic. She included me in absolutely everything. In five short weeks, she introduced me to a world of wonder, hope, social work, detective ‘skills’, more acronyms than I thought possible, and nursing that I felt I instinctively understood. The service users I met, the support I had from the team, and the variety offered by this field of nursing sold me the idea that this was where I was meant to be.

It greatly saddens me that when I was in school in the 1980s, children with learning disabilities were kept separate from us. Knowing now that LD nurses provide specialist healthcare and support to people with a learning disability, their families, and carers to enable them to live a fulfilling life gives me great hope. I’m mindful that services are not always as they could or should be, but there’s a body of people striving to ensure that those with a learning disability are valued, cared for equally, and understood.

I hope that when I qualify, those facets of nursing we see today, where all service users are given the same person-centred care as others, will have evolved even further. An inclusive environment where the healthcare needs of all are treated equally and where reasonable adjustments are made instinctively without question. A society that welcomes and embraces diversity.

LD nursing has brought me ‘home’ again – it just took me 47 years to find it.”