A new report has highlighted a 25% drop in the number of nurses who work with people with learning disabilities in Scotland. 

The Royal College of Nursing is calling for a greater focus on this specialist role role as it warned the numbers working across NHS Scotland services fell by 351 from 1,399 to 1,048 between March 2015 and December 2019.

Eddie McConnell, the chief executive of Down’s Syndrome Scotland, said the findings were “worrying”.

He tweeted: ‘As one family told me, “The (late) involvement of a Learning Disability Nurse was like the arrival of the cavalry during the pandemic. Suddenly, common sense and pragmatism kicked in.”’

Scots with learning disabilities have been hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic, with essential support services closed and virus death rates in the first wave three times higher than those in the rest of the population.

The Scottish government is promising to announce a raft of proposals to improve support for people with learning disabilities by reducing inappropriate institutional placements, healthandcare.scot has reported, while Nicola Sturgeon has backed a requirement for services to provide care in the community.

Yet in their new report, the Royal College of Nursing warns that Scotland, along with England, was witnessing a long-term decline in learning disability nursing staff.

This part of the workforce currently has a vacancy rate of 4%, one in ten of posts having been unfilled for three months or more, according to the report.

There are around 17,000 registered learning disability specialist nurses in the UK and, while many nurses will have shifted from health to social care settings, the RCN warns a lack of data across the four nations means it is unclear where thousands of them are currently working.

‘There is limited other information available to identify where the nurses who do not work for the NHS/HSCNI [Health & Social Care Northern Ireland] are,’ says the report. 

‘We do not know if they remain in clinical practice or where they are currently employed… it is not possible to say with confidence if there is a shortage of learning disability nurses with the evolving service models, or where the impact of any shortages of the learning disability nursing workforce will be felt greatest.’

The Scottish Commission for Learning Disability (SCLD) told healthandcare.scot the pandemic had highlighted the “vital role” played by these nurses.

“We have heard consistent feedback about how they have in a time of great uncertainty and anxiety provided rights-based and person centred healthcare. That is why it is concerning to see the report highlight the reduction in numbers,” a spokesperson said.

“Moving forward, SCLD believes learning disability nurses will play a fundamentally important role in addressing the health inequalities faced by people with learning disabilities in Scotland as we emerge from the pandemic. We support the call by RCN for the necessary planning and funding to be in place to secure the future provision of learning disability nursing and ensure the vital services they will be in place for the future.”

Read more: Fears over ‘smokescreen’ day service cuts; Covid learning disability deaths three times higher; Scots with learning disabilities ‘invisible’ in virus  

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