The new learning disability nursing : agents of inclusion for the 21st Century

There continues to be unthinking stigmatisation of learning disability nurses, and a cynical attitude to the contribution they make to the lives of people with learning disabilities. Paradoxically, examples can be found within the nursing profession itself (Turnbull 2002), as well as in other literature concerning learning disability. In a guest editorial for the British Journal of Learning Disability, Jackson has commented: ‘the highly ambiguous, and often uncomfortable role of nurses throughout the twentieth century. …he [Mitchell] acknowledges that nurses have been part of an oppressive system that has often denied certain rights to people with learning difficulties.’ (Jackson 2000, 47) Such an observation is undeniably true, but fails to place nursing within a temporal context.