Talking about death and dying

Since moving into lecturing I have become interested in discussions about death and dying. Last year at a conference organised by Tracey Lloyd, Wales’s first Macmillan specialist nurse for learning disabilities, I heard lecturer Stuart Todd discussing where people with learning disabilities are when they die.

This inspired me to reflect on the discussions we have with pre-registration nursing students about death and dying. We discuss key factors in meeting the needs of people with learning disabilities, such as care needs of the ageing population, health inequalities, co-morbidities and communication.

In their literature review Cavaye and Watts (2014) comment that the curriculum focuses too little on death and dying, although there are emerging attempts to develop this topic in educational programmes.