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What I would say to people who are considering nursing as a career: Come and look at Learning
Disability Nursing, it has a lot to offer. Learning Disability Nursing is a great branch
of nursing. It gives you time to spend with the patients and get to know them one on one.
It's more person-centred and that's something that I enjoy about Learning Disability Nursing.
In the first year, they'll look at the fundamentals of nursing across the four fields of nursing,
which is adult, child, mental health and, of course, the learning disability perspective.
The way we deliver the course is very, very varied, so not everything's in a traditional
lecture. We've got small groups, we do presentations The focus for the three years will be around,
initially the fundamentals of nursing, and that'll be across the fields - adult, child,
mental health, and, of course, learning disability nursing. And from that point, they will develop
awareness of things like communication skills, which is vital in the role of the learning
disability nurse, person-centred approaches, and some of the person-centred tools that
they will be using in practice. So the course is split between 50-50. 50%
of the time is theory and 50% of the time is placements. You'll have your CRB checks
and then you'll go on to do your placements. Placements are really diverse and we do try
to ensure that each student will get a snapshot of a lot of different environments that they
possibly will be working in in the future. My favourite placement has been supporting
adults with learning disabilities and autism, and I'm really enjoying the placement that
I'm on now, which is a community team which supports people living in their own houses
and within residential support. We get different placements every time. I've
had one in a dementia ward with challenging behaviour. I've had some supported living
placements and community nursing - that one was my favourite - and there was an abundance
of opportunities on that placement. We did a piece of research and I actually wrote that
up and got my work published in the Royal College of Nursing magazine.
Placements are good. You have a varied amount of placement experiences. You can have forensic
nursing to community nursing, you could even have interbranch nursing experiences, which
I'd really recommend because you really get to see your skills in a different setting.
The students will get quite a lot of support throughout the three years and initially they
will be allocated a personal tutor, which will be one of the learning disability nursing
lecturers who will support them through the three years. They will also, on practice,
have mentors who are supporting them will their assessments in practice, and that will
usually be a learning disability nurse. Because our course is quite small, you get
to know the lecturers and all of your classmates as well. You become quite a close knit family
and really supportive and helpful to each other.
One of our students has gone on to win the Nursing Times Learning Disability Nursing
Student of the Year award, and some of that is about the additional stuff that we've done
over the course of the three years, and we actually had three students shortlisted in
that category. We're really proud about that because there were only nine nationally that
were shortlisted and three of those were from the University of Cumbria.
We all went down to London to a very glamorous, glitzy event, and they called my name out.
So, yes, apparently student of the year. I was really shocked, really shocked. I was
really proud that I could bring it back to the University of Cumbria because it's a big
thank you to everybody who's inspired me, who's encouraged me, who's enabled me to be
the best person I can be. Come to an open day. If you've got a bit of
interest in it, you think it might be for you, come along. Come and have a chat with
the team.