2: Background Literature and Research

To contextualise this research project, this chapter presents a range of issues relating to intellectual disability nursing by drawing on and examining an extensive literature obtained from a range of different sources that includes peer-reviewed articles, reports and policy documents, books, chapters from books as well as articles and commentaries. Also included is a material retrieved from a range of primary historical documents available at the National Archives at Kew London. We present this chapter as a hybrid review that combines both the narrative and conceptual forms (Grant & Booth, 2009). We have achieved this by using electronic searchers such as MEDLINE and CINAHL, and have supplemented this with hand searches, and following up on citations in both scholarly and grey literature which tend not to surface in conventional systematic search strategies. Our intention is to provide the reader with a comprehensive depiction as to the challenges that have pervaded, and continue to pervade, intellectual disability nursing as a legitimate part of nursing and the wider health and social care workforce. This depiction provides a backdrop to the oral histories given by the participants of this study; to be reported on and discussed in subsequent chapters. For ease of reading, these factors are organised under four broad themes: changing social and economic influences on service philosophies and the nature of care and support, social and health care policy, the profession and finally the individual (see Fig. 2.1), although the reader should remain cognisant as to the inherent complexity of interplay between these themes.