Learning Disability: Nursing

Running head: LEARNING DISABILITY: NURSING
LEARNING DISABILITY: NURSING
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

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Introduction:
Learning disability is a condition of reduced intellectual ability associated with
difficulty in everyday activities like social activity, daily household work, earning money by
employment. The people with a learning disability are found to take longer time than others
to learn and need assistance to take up new skills, interact with others and understand any
complicated situation or information. There are three types of learning disability, mild
learning disability, moderate learning disability and profound/severe learning disability. The
mild learning disability is difficult to identify as the individual can perform most of the task
with other normal individuals, though they find difficulty in works like form filling. People
with a profound learning disability need assistance in almost all the daily works like
communicating, moving. To write a reflective essay on learning disability relevance to
nursing approaches, I choose the Gibbs cyclic model of reflective writing (Alfonso and
Flanagan 2018).
Description:
In my reflective writing, I will be reflecting on my experiences I gained on the child
department of a well-known hospital, where I was placed as a learning disability nurse. The
duties of a learning disability nurse is not a cakewalk for me, as the duties come with lots of
challenges. The people with the problem need special care. According to the report of the
official site of the United Kingdom government approximately, 286,00 children suffer from
learning disability, where the percentage of moderate learning disability is severe learning
disabilities are 89% and 24% respectively (mentalhealth.org.uk, 2020). In my yea of nursing,
I observed that the case of learning disability is prevalence in economically low-income

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families. The children with a severe learning disability need assistance in learning new
things, as well as performing daily works (Zarkowska and Clements 2018). One of the
biggest challenges of being a learning disability nurse is voicing the need of the patients and
forming a bond with them as they are unable to express themselves. One boy, admitted with a
severe learning disability and tendency to harm others, admitted to the hospital. He was
throwing things nearby him to other people, screaming and trying to bite anyone closer to
him. He was so aggressive that the threw a flower vas to his father, who came to admit him
in hospital. I was terrified of seeing his violent behaviour and hesitated to go to him, taking
up the charge of his treatment. However, with time, I started interacting with him. He
became calm, expressive and his condition improved with time. At the initial stage, he was
not a stage that the health care provider can start his treatment, but with time, patience and
care, he became approachable to treatment. Another 17 years old girl admitted to the hospital
had a problem expressing herself. She has the problem of understanding words, writing and
calculating. However, she was not agreed to undergo any treatment to resolve her problems
(Stafford 2018). I questioned her parents and got to know that she was bullied, physically and
mentally abused in the school during her early school days and obtain a severe fear towards
any learning activity. I discussed the problem with my team, deciding a holistic approach of
treatment along with medication for her (Parkin et al. 2020).
Feelings:
Becoming a learning disability nurse was a dream for me since my childhood, as one
on of my close relative is working as a registered nurse for learning disability for more than
thirty years. Seeing her helping the patients of learning disability patients, motivated me to
take up the course of becoming a learning disability nurse. I understand the challenges of
being learning disable nurse in the time of my practical days. The patients come for the
treatment are hard to handle as they were unable to express their needs. It was quite a

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challenge for me to understand the behaviour, analyze and do the needful for my patients.
Some cases of learning disability came with aggression and even harder to handle. The senior
nurses sometimes failed to convince the patient that they are not the treatment is for their
benefit only. During the year of my junior nursing, I assisted the senior nurses, and my
experiences helped me a lot to perform my duty smoothly. To help the patients, my
colleagues and me designed an intervention for the boy with aggression and learning
disability (Sridevi et al. 2015). However, we need to apply intervention more rapidly to calm
the patients, where we failed. The patients' aggression scared my team, which can become a
serious obstacle in our nursing career. To overcome the obstacle, we need to handle more
such cases, to understand and rectify our errors during treatment.
Evaluation:
The experience of being a learning disability nurse in the child department had both
good and bad memories. The experience helped me to enhance my understanding of my role
as a nurse (Gunasekara et al. 2014). My duty was to examine the level of learning disability
of the child, teaching them skills that can help them to perform their daily needs, maintain
their wellbeing and helping with the activities that they fail to perform by themselves. I used
to design a care plan according to the major issues of the patients and monitor the
improvement result. In my senior years, when I became a team leader, responsibility
increases (Ellis 2018). I was responsible for coordinating the health care plan with the other
social welfare professionals, organizing visits to the home of the patients to measure the
improvement, planning activities for the patience and coordinate with the service users
(Cohen et al. 2015). I gained a profound knowledge about the test, result evaluation, analysis
by assisting the testing process. As a learning disability nurse, my team and I was responsible
for organizing awareness camp in our locality about learning disability (Tomaschewski-
Barlem et al. 2018). Patient admitted in the hospital were unable to communicate, rising the