REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE AHEAD CONFERENCE, THE REAL RISK IS DOING NOTHING
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE AHEAD CONFERENCE, THE REAL RISK IS DOING NOTHING
Dia dhíbh a chairde, I’m very happy to be here with you all today to open this important conference. I’d like to thank Ann Healen, Executive Director of AHEAD for her kind invitation to join you this morning.
The title of today’s event - ‘The real risk is doing nothing: Supporting nursing and midwifery students with a disability in clinical practice’ - suggests we are new to this challenge and I am looking forward to learning more about the way forward in ensuring that nursing, midwifery, as well as other health science courses, can fully include students with disabilities.
Immense progress has been made and thanks to attitudinal changes, among other things, many barriers have been reduced or eliminated for people with disabilities. However it is still important to say that people with a disability continue to be under-represented in too many walks of Irish life – in politics as well as in public and private sector employment, including the medical profession. There are many reasons why this may be the case, but one of the main factors has been the historically low, the shamefully low levels of participation by young people and adults with a disability at all levels of the education system, including higher education. Thankfully this landscape is changing for the better. In the last decade or so the average participation rate of students with disabilities in higher education has increased, from just 1% of undergraduates in 1999 to 6% in 2009.
Today’s conference is about addressing the challenges now that about 1 in 25 or 4% of students participating on Nurse Education programmes have a disability. Each person here is driven by an eagerness to ensure that even more young people with a disability will be better equipped and encouraged to further their future education and training in all sectors, including Nurse Education programmes. Wonderfully innovative work is being carried out by organisations such as AHEAD, to highlight educational issues for people with disabilities and to take positive action to address them. Such work is critical to ensuring we achieve a fair and equitable society and also that we harness the talent of all the people in our society for the benefit of that society, bar none. I commend everyone involved in championing this important work. You open doors not close them; thanks to you, more and more young people with a disability have more and more choices and know and understand too that not alone will they be welcome into these programmes but that they will be supported throughout.
Today, our focus is on how students with disabilities are fully included in nursing and midwifery studies, in particular in the clinical practice element of these programmes. Attracting people from diverse backgrounds to this role is of great benefit to patients, colleagues and society as a whole. The life experiences of people with disabilities and their resourcefulness in overcoming barriers and obstacles enriches higher education institutions and the nursing profession. But we should not have to make special pleading or justifications – those who would exclude are the ones who have to explain why the life opportunities, the civil and human rights of a human being are restricted arbitrarily, why their talents are wasted, why their insight and wisdom is overlooked and missing from where it could do most good.
Many of you in this room will be aware that the challenge of supporting students with disabilities in nursing programmes is quite different to that faced by other academic courses. The particular challenge lies in the fact that half the programme is completed in clinical practice and requires designing clinical placements in such a way that students with disabilities can access reasonable accommodations. As AHEAD and the UCD School of Nursing have rightly identified, it’s one thing to introduce disability awareness and training in an academic setting, where there are a limited number of academic staff who work constantly with the students. It’s quite another to broaden out that pedagogical knowledge to the many qualified nurses and midwives who act as preceptors, tutors, supervisors during the essential clinical placement elements of any nursing or midwifery training programme. Bedside training and exposure to every clinical aspect of nursing duties are vital learning experiences and it is through properly supervised clinical placements that trainee nurses and midwives can learn the caring, compassionate ethos that guides nursing practice in Ireland. Ensuring that students with a disability are appropriately included in all aspects of clinical placements has to be vital to their future success as the nurses and midwives of tomorrow. It means changes to infrastructure, changes to pedagogy, some big, some small; it means mainstreamed high levels of sensitivity and response to a range of disabilities, it means moving out of our comfort zones, it means making a new kind of thinking as well as physical space in which to accommodate those previously excluded because we reached for the stereotype, the easy reasons to exclude and ignored the potential, lived with the injustice.
I understand that guidelines for how this is to be achieved are at an advanced stage of development and I would like to commend AHEAD and UCD on leading the way with this work. These guidelines will be key to raising awareness of how to design clinical practice in such a way that students with disabilities can access reasonable accommodations. In other words all staff, academic and non-academic, have an important role to play if an institution is to whole-heartedly support the needs of students with disabilities.
Back in 1914, Florence Nightingale, the mother of modern nursing said "Unless we are making progress in our nursing every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back." Now almost a century later, this conference provides us with a very important opportunity to make very real progress in the area of nursing and midwifery education. Your vital work is educating all, whether academics, healthcare professionals, health service users, to the reality and the necessity of facilitating students with a disability so that they can feel fully supported and fully included in our education and training systems.
Drawing on the experience of our international peers, today’s conference can help us develop a coherent, integrated approach to the provision of services and support for learners with disabilities in nursing clinical practice. I would like to both commend and thank everyone involved in the organisation of today’s event, in particular the staff of the UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Systems and AHEAD. To all the participants here today I say that with your help and the ongoing dedication and commitment demonstrated by your presence, I believe that greater equality of access for students with disabilities to a much broader range of opportunities can be achieved in the coming years.
Is iontach an obair atá ar siúl agaibh anseo inniu. Gurb fada buan sibh ‘s go raibh maith agaibh.