Transcript

Living with visual impairment: nurse support

JACKIE

I needed the nurses to comfort me, which sounds quite a strange term to use. I wanted sympathy, which again is not a term that you would often use with anybody with an impairment or a disability, but because I was so, I’ll say ill at that time, I just needed somebody to look after me. I also needed the nurses to believe in me because sometimes with this type of impairment it is not visible to the other person – I can only describe and explain what I’m seeing or feeling or hearing etcetera – and when you haven’t got a diagnosis as such, as I hadn’t at that time, you haven’t got anything to hang it on so I needed the nurses to believe what I was saying and to comfort me and to calm me.

Independence to anybody with any type of impairment is extremely important but the road to independence is quite long and arduous. At the beginning you are mostly dependent on people and you do need that sympathy, you do need that support and you do need that help to get through the initial symptoms of what you are experiencing. As you learn to live with the impairment, then you need to be able to take control of your life and this is where nurses can play a big role, by being able to give the power to the person with the impairment. It’s very easy to want to do things for people but that's not actually helping anybody in the long run; you need to enable that person to do things for themselves. You talk to them, you ask them what they want to do, you ask them what they think they can do for themselves and you try and just push them a little bit more each time. But again you have to be very clever here and you need to note when that person needs to stop, they need to just pull back a bit and they need some support. So for a nurse it is very difficult here because you don’t know how a person is going to be. You don’t know exactly how much dependence and independence he or she might need at any particular time so you have to read that person on not only a day-to-day basis but perhaps an hourly basis at some times when there are certain things going on, but promoting independence is one of the main roles that a nurse can provide for somebody with impairment.