Learning Disabilities Nursing

Highlights

Receive full tuition fee support from NHS Wales plus £1,000 towards living costs when you commit to working in Wales for two years after graduation. Additional financial incentives are available if you choose to study in Welsh, helping strengthen health and social care services across our communities. A 50/50 balance between university learning and clinical placements gives you hands-on experience with children, young people and adults with a learning disability, working in homes, schools, community services, and specialist health and social care teams.

Train in cutting-edge clinical skills and simulation facilities, including mock hospital wards, community flats, high-fidelity manikins and advanced VR suites, building the confidence to transfer your skills into practice. Taught and supported by experienced practitioners and leading academics, you’ll benefit from Bangor’s research-informed teaching and its close links with local services, ensuring your learning is always connected to real-world practice. A hugely rewarding and impactful career, you’ll play a vital role in promoting health, wellbeing and social inclusion, supporting not just individuals with a learning disability but also their families and carers, and shaping more inclusive communities.

Course overview

Whatever first motivates you to want to work in partnership with people with learning disability, it’s a decision our students never regret. As a learning disabilities nurse, you’ll provide the specialist assessment, treatment, care and support to enable children, young people and adults facing a range of physical and mental challenges to lead a fulfilling life as independently as possible. Validated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), our Bachelor of Learning Disabilities Nursing (BN) prepares you to become a professional, caring and competent nurse, who prioritises patient needs.

It blends wide-ranging clinical placements* with research based theory and supported clinical skills training featuring experts through experience and virtual technologies, which enable you to practise skills in a supported environment. Spending half of your time on placement instils the importance of being part of a wider healthcare team, where you are supported by a designated practice supervisor and practice assessor to support you to develop your clinical skills. You’ll be working alongside experienced nurses with valuable knowledge and insight they are only too willing to pass on.

You’ll also be taught by academics and clinical experts who are passionate to share their wealth of skills, knowledge and experience of learning disabilities nursing. Learning disabilities nursing is underpinned by values of equality and inclusion, human rights, personalisation, strengths-based, person-centred, partnerships, respect and health-focused. These values underpin learning disabilities nursing practice and the BN (Hons) Learning Disabilities Nursing course.

Understanding diversity is key to providing person-centred, holistic nursing to meet identified needs. Learning disabilities nurses work in partnership with the person and their family and/or carers, often alongside multidisciplinary teams across health and social care. You will develop an understanding of their needs and use an evidence-based approach to think creatively and flexibility to support and enable individuals to reach their full potential.

From the outset, clinical skills training builds the skills required to become a professional registered nurse. Our simulation-based training equipment, using VR and lifelike manikins, lets you safely examine ‘patients’ and interact in real-time to clinical situations based on real-life examples. This prepares you for the realities of working and responding to such situations, both on placement and future practice.

Clinical placements across Wales enable you (subject to availability) to experience a range of settings where children, young persons, adults…