Lauretta Ofulue, a Health Visitor at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, was a speaker at the Learning Disability Today and Kingston University conference. She talked about how she left her career in financial services to train as a nurse for people with learning disabilities following the death of her son Otito, who had autism. Not only was her son autistic, but he could not speak and had a global developmental delay. After the death of her son, she and her husband, Jerry, decided to finish their training in learning disability nursing to add to the number of nurses in their field. Lauretta and her husband said that they also had to constantly fight to get their voices heard. “It was always a fight to get Otitio’s needs met. We were unaware of the genuine constraints being faced by professionals, but all we wanted was to keep our son safe, healthy, and happy. Sometimes, staff did not communicate with us very well, and this added to our frustration. This led us to sometimes perceive them as being against us.”
Learn more about this story by visiting the Learning Disability Today link below:
My journey to becoming a learning disability nurse (learningdisabilitytoday.co.uk)