Hello and welcome to my first ever blog.

My name is Scott Watkin and I joined SeeAbility in July 2013 as an Eye Care and Vision Development Officer. Before that I was SeeAbility’s eye 2 eye Ambassador where I would chair conferences.

We know adults with learning disabilities are ten times more likely to have serious sight problems than other people.

I am one of those people.

I have a condition called keratoconus which means my cornea is not flat and is shaped like a rugby ball. My vision can be blurry. I have had lots of surgery to correct it. I have been lucky to have the right support for my eye care, if I hadn’t had it, I would be sitting at home really close to the TV!

It means I am a good person to give advice, because I have the experience of having a learning disability and needing eye care.

I love my job

But what does it involve? I travel lots of miles around the country talking about good eye care. I give people with learning disabilities good information about how and where they can go and get an eye test. I also tell people with learning disabilities what might happen at an eye test.

I train opticians around learning disability awareness and how to work with somebody with a learning disability. I am also involved with giving lectures at different universities talking to student learning disability nurses about eye care and vision, to give them some awareness around this subject. SeeAbility has really good information for children and adults with learning disabilities including easy read factsheets and forms. It is great when health professionals and self advocates tell me how they have found them helpful.  

I speak at national conferences too.

I am involved with SeeAbility’s own services and help the people we support to have a voice within SeeAbility and out in the community too.

Why did I choose to work at SeeAbility?

Because I wanted to make sure that people with learning disabilities get good eye care and vision.

And to make sure that people with learning disabilities still had a voice, or are able to make and be a part of making changes.

It would be good if you would kindly leave me some feedback in the comments below for my blog and I will reply. I will be writing every month, next time read about Positive Choices conference which I went to, where I met over 400 learning disability nurses!

You can follow me on Twitter: @scottwatkin