Nursing With Dyslexia: Help And Advice

In this informative video, Claire shares the signs of dyslexia in adults, how the assessment process works, and practical tips you can use, from where to get support for dyslexia to apps that can help with assignments.

Hi everyone, and welcome back. My name is Claire Carmichael. I'm a Registered Nurse and a lecturer. And today's video is all about neurodiversity with a special focus on dyslexia.

I really wanted to do this video because I have struggled my whole life without knowing the reason, and it's only by chance that recently, when I became a lecturer at a university, I wanted to have an assessment for dyslexia myself because I knew that something wasn't quite right.

But I never wanted to get the support or the help because I found other ways around things; I didn't really find it a problem as such, but in my role as a lecturer at a university, I didn't want my problems to affect the students. And that was my biggest priority. I want to be able to be a role model to my students and I don't want to get it wrong for them if I mark in their assignments and things like that.

I wanted to have an assessment and if I need any support to have it in place so that I can get it right for my students and hopefully give people help, tips and advice along the way as I discover more about this and myself.

What Is Dyslexia?

So what is dyslexia? Dyslexia is a learning difficulty. It usually affects your reading and writing. For my case, it's reading and writing and speaking, but dyslexia is a neurological condition. It's that processing of information in the brain and sometimes thing's just aren’t linking up.

And dyslexic people may have problems with processing and remembering the information that they see and hear, but it can also affect things like organizational skills.

Signs Of Dyslexia In Adults

More and more people are being diagnosed as adults and don't realize some of the signs and symptoms.

So here is a big list. Do you…

Confuse visually similar words, such as cat and cot?

Spell erratically?

Find it hard to scan or skim texts?

Read or write slowly?

Need to reread paragraphs to understand them?

Find it hard to listen and maintain focus?

Find it hard to concentrate, and there's distractions?

Feel sensations of mental overload and switching off?

Have difficulty telling left from right?

Get confused when given several instructions all at once?

Have difficulty organizing your thoughts on paper?

Often forget conversations or important dates?

Have difficulty with personal organization, time management and prioritizing tasks?

Avoid certain types of work or study?

Find some tasks really easy, but are unexpectedly challenged by others?

Have poor self-esteem, especially if dyslexic difficulties have not been identified in the earlier life?

And how many people in the UK have dyslexia? It's estimated that one in 10 people, but there is an overall estimate of over 6 million people in the UK that may have dyslexia that might not have even been diagnosed yet.

Computer Based Assessments

So I approached my disability team at the university, and I had two assessments.

The first assessment I did was a computer-based assessment. I sat down and read the screen. The first section was all about puzzles and working things out which I'm really good at because I've always had computer games. I'm good at working things out and puzzles; I'm a very creative thinker like that.

So, I knew that for section I would be okay at it. As much anxiety as that gave me, looking at it and trying to work it out, I was actually okay with that.

And then there were other sections where you had to put the words together: they would split up whole words into three sections and you had to put the right sections together and things like that to make the whole word.

Then there would be a speaking element. So, they would speak the word through the headphones, and then you had to type the spelling of it.

You had to associate objects with words as well, something like a tree. And then you'd have a load of random words and you had to associate the picture with the word. So for example, with the tree, they would have words like bus, car, road, wood. So, then you think tree and wood, they must go together.

I didn't actually look through all of my results properly, but just trying to give you an example of the types of things that I had on my assessment.

One-To-One Assessments

Then she (the disability assessor) looked at the results and she wasn't happy with them. So, she asked me to come in to do a follow- up assessment, which we did one-to-one. We sat down, we had paper, and it was written down, and I interacted with the disability assessor for this one. So, it wasn't computer based, but it was paper based.

It took about an hour and a half I think, altogether. And for that assessment there were loads of different things that I did.

There was a quiz at the start that we did on paper, and then there was one where you had to highlight the wrong words and then you had to speak outwards. The assessor gave me a whole paragraph to read, put the timer on, and then she would time how quickly you could read and write out a paragraph. She would say a load of words and I had to write them down as quickly as I could and spell them right. There were so many different things.

And there was a picture gallery as well. I think there were six or nine images, but they repeated themselves. You'd go to the top and you had to say out loud all the words matching the images. So, it was like “cat dog bus, cat dog bus, cat dog bus, etc.” But there was a lot of images to go through and I got a few of those wrongs as well. I started to say the opposite for some things.

There was a lot of things in both assessments that picked up that I was dyslexic.

The assessor said, "I can see from your workings out from both the computer based one and the written one that you are a real thinker. You've got those creative thoughts in your thinking process and your speaking and writing process, but there's a problem with the connection there, and that's where your dyslexia sits."

I have problems with reading out loud, which I knew. Spelling and grammar and punctuation, which I absolutely knew, has also always been a problem for me.

This is why I've always had people proofread my work in the past and physically saying new words to me that I don't understand. I've done many videos before on my own YouTube channel, all about how to say medical jargon. I have an anatomy and physiology book that sort of phonetically spells all the words out for you so that you can get how to say medical terminology because I haven't got a clue. I physically can't say some words.

And I thought that was just me being silly. I didn't actually think that was a dyslexic thing, but apparently that is a very, very dyslexic thing. I know the basic English language. Anything above that, I don't know, and I can't say because I've never heard those sounds before. I don't know how to write them out, I don't know how to spell them.

So that's where those problems come in. All this time I've made a joke about my own disability because it's always been a running joke with me. Like, "Oh, I can't say this word." And me and my patients will have a good old laugh about it because I can't say words or medication names and things like that.

And I suppose that's kind of nice in a way because it does break the ice with my patients, and it makes them warm to you because you show that you're a human being. You're not this medical person that knows everything. So that's always gone in my favor, I think. But I've always made a joke out of it without realizing I actually have an impairment.

Some people might think, "Well, how did you do a degree? How did you do the Access course? How have you got on so well in life with this? How have you managed?"

Because of my creative side. This is what the assessor said to me at the time of my assessment. She said, "Because of your creative thinking side, you've got this ability to adapt and overcome."

Ask Friends & Family To Proofread For You

So, for me personally, throughout my degree, like I said earlier, I got people to proofread my work. I got friends, family, things like that to proofread my assignments because I knew my spelling and my grammar was really bad, and I always got people to proofread my assignments for me before I submitted.

It's estimated that one in 10 people, but there is an overall estimate of over 6 million people in the UK that may have dyslexia that might not have even been diagnosed yet.

Find Articles & Research You Can Understand

Because I can't read medical jargon, like I was saying, I have problem with new information, big new fancy words. Big academic words for me are a complete no-no, I will not understand something like that. For me, when I was going out to find pieces of research for articles and things like that, I really, really struggled to read some of them because they were so heavy academically. I couldn't understand it.

I actually have a book that I bought, but I've only read a few pages of it because it's so wordy. I physically cannot read it. I'm reading it and then I can't understand it. So, I reread it and then I'm googling some of the words to try and get a better understanding of those words. And it's just not enjoyable for me. I like simple, easy to understand words that make sense to me.

One of the things that I did to overcome this, if I found an article or a research paper that I physically cannot read, I didn't use it. I found ones that I could understand, and I could read. And when I was writing my assignments, usually there's a topic of choice as well. There were always things like sexual health or there'd be long-term conditions like asthma, obesity, stroke, things like that. I picked the one that was the easiest for me, and for me it was always sexual health because I worked in sexual health, I understand the language. So, I know that if I pick up a research paper or an article, I'm going to understand it.

So that is my first top tip for you. If you struggle to understand big, fancy academic words and I think actually most of us will do this, especially as a first-year Student Nurse, or if you're not academic, you don't understand academic language. You might potentially struggle with this whether you have dyslexia or not. So just a top tip for me is if you don't understand it, completely scrap it and find something else.

Make Use Of Libraries & Academic Services

Make use of your library, and your academic services at university. At Birmingham City University we had the Academic Development Department or Personal Development Department.

It used to be called PDD and I made full use of those services. I booked in for one-to-one tutorials, same with the library as well. If I didn't understand something, I went and I got the help. So that is one of my biggest tips.

One, if you don't understand it, you don't want to use it, don't use it. Find something else that you can understand. If you physically can't find anything else and you only have this one research paper that you are relying on, but you can't understand it, get help and support. Get someone to explain it to you and see if you can use it within your assignment that way.

Start Assignments As Soon As You Can

The next thing I did to help me with my assignments was as soon as they launched the assignment brief, I started my assignment there and then because I can't physically do an assignment overnight.

Hats off to anybody that can do that, that can just knock out an assignment overnight. It is just incredible to me. But I couldn't physically do that. It takes me a lot longer to find the research, find articles, to read through things, to write things properly, and then to get it proofread as well on top of that is really time consuming.

So, I pulled off the assignment brief from our university page and I started my assignment there and then. It just helped me manage my workload, it helped me keep on target and was just the biggest tip I can use for that.

But there are also a lot of tips and advice on the nurses.co.uk website. There's so many blog posts and videos on assignment writing and assignment tips. Please go and check them out.

Support From Your Disability Service

Now if you have something like dyslexia, please get help and support from your disability service. Hopefully you've got a good team at the university you're at. I know Birmingham City University have got an incredible team.

Make sure you get a support statement in place for you because you can get so much support from the disability team. You can get extra funding as well for extra devices you might need for your laptop, color screens for your laptop so that you've got different colored backgrounds to help you read properly. There's a lot of different support services available to you.

You'll also get things like extra time for your exams, extra support put in place for assignment writing, for poster presentations or any presentation. With anything like that, you'll get extra time and different adjustments made for you because of your dyslexia.

So please get that support statement in place and get the support that you really need. I have found just so many things useful since I've been diagnosed with my dyslexia because I've been given the tools to help me.

Use The ‘Read Aloud’ Tool To Review Work

So one thing that I have found, which I'm about to bring up on my laptop and show you, is to do with Word documents. When writing your assignments, some of you may already know this tip, but I never knew this was a thing properly and I'd never used it before.

I'm going to get up my Microsoft Word, but other platforms are available. So, I have got up Word document. These are just some case studies that I randomly typed out for fun one day. But I'm just going to show you a quick tip on Word document.

If you've written your assignment, you can use a voice narration service to read out your assignment to you to help it make sense.

So, on your Word document, if you go to the top of the bar, so this blue bar here where it I've got the title ‘Case Studies’, along next to here, next to the printer icon is three little dots. Click those three dots and then go all the way down to ‘read aloud’. That will bring up that little emoji there, the A with the little speakerphone. And this will read it out for you.

Speaker 2: You have a young mother around 24 years old, come into your GP for a wound dressing on her child who is two years old. She tells you that she left her child in the highchair in the kitchen while she-

Claire: There you go. That is an example. I don't know if you can change the voice on this. Oh yes, you can. Hang on a minute. Sorry, I'm getting distracted now. Grandma. [Selects alternative voice from drop down menu].

Speaker 2: ... Went out to the toilet. When she returned her baby had-

Claire Carmichael: That's not for me. Do you know what? I think Daniel was the best one.

Speaker 2: The resident refuses as she is watching TV and does not want to go.

Claire: But just to give you the option, you can change the voices. I prefer Daniel. You may prefer a different voice tone to what you hear and what you see. So just have a look and have a play around to see what difference that can make to your assignments.

Because sometimes you type something out and for me, I can't recognize my own mistakes. That's one of my biggest problems. I write something how I speak in my head, which is completely different to everyday language, I think. So I'll be typing something and to me it makes sense. So, I can't notice my own mistakes, but if someone else reads it and they go, "This doesn't quite make sense, Claire, you need to just reword this like this”, or “your punctuations off or you need a space or a paragraph etc."

I can't recognize those mistakes in myself. So having this function, reading it aloud in somebody else's voice, it just really helps me to connect where my mistakes are.

But not only that, I have found this most useful recently when I've been doing marking. I've been marking student assignments recently and the biggest thing that I found was there was one or two sentences in a couple of the assignments that I read out loud, but in my head, they didn't make sense. It wasn't connecting.

I was like, "That doesn't sound right. What have they written there? I don't even understand what they've written." It was normal words, but in my head it wasn't connecting for some reason. And then I put on the voice on it and it read it out completely differently to how I read it in my head. Suddenly it made sense and then I could read it.

I read it back after I'd heard the voice read it and I was like, "Oh. Actually, that does make sense. That is a proper sentence." But in that moment, somewhere in my dyslexic brain, it wasn't registering, it wasn't connecting. Those neurons weren't firing to say, "This is a proper sentence," for some reason.

So that's been the most beneficial thing in my lecturing role right now. And similar to the ‘read loud’ tool on my Word document, there are so many different apps that you can download onto your mobile phone or your laptop that are going to help you, that do that sort of thing for reading different documents and things for you.

There are loads of useful contacts to help you. You have your university, who have hopefully got all the contacts and the disability support for you, and you also have free software… if you suspect you do have dyslexia, go and get an assessment and get the support that you need and deserve to help you succeed like everybody else.

Text-To-Speech & Other Accessibility Apps/ Features

So, it's not just a Word document thing. You can get free apps as well. One of the free apps that I found, let me just go back to this page, is called Claro Speak. Just some other apps to go with that include Dolphin Easy reader.

You've got Tint Vision, which can tint your screen as well. Also on your screen, if you go onto settings and accessibility on your mobile phone, there's different tints and things and dark mode that you can use for your phone that'll help you to read things better. Like I was saying earlier, sometimes it's reading it on different backgrounds can really make a big difference.

For me, if my laptop's too white and too bright, it really affects my eyes. So, I tend to turn the brightness on my laptop down as well. That really helps me. So that might be something that helps you as well.

There are several different screen readers for things like Windows, or for Apple, if you're a MacBook fan.

Some apps for Windows are JAWS (Job Access with Speech), which works on Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. You've got NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access). It's a free, open-source reader for Windows computers. You've also got Narrator for Windows again.

Then for the Apple devices, you've got something called Voiceover. It's a screen reader for Apple devices, Mac computers, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch and Apple TV.

For Android devices, we've got something called Talk Back which you can find in the Google Play Store, but it already might be built-in in some devices. Check your device if you've got this already.

There are other useful things to help you if you have dyslexia, especially when you're reading text.

I've spoken about colors, using different color backgrounds. Or you can buy a screen filter or glasses with a tint as well, that can help.

Changing the font size or zooming in. That's something again I like to do as well when I'm reading on Word document. Increasing the space between the rows as well is something that we've always been told to do in our assignment writing anyway. We've always used 1.5 spacing possibly for this reason and choose a font that you're comfortable with.

Spell Checkers, Voice Recognition & How-To Guides

Here are some useful tips for checking or correcting spellings. I think a lot of us use a lot of Google or iPhones. Using Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, Alexa, that sort of thing can help you spell words. This is something I do. If I don't know how to spell something, I will ask someone to help me spell it, whether it's my phone, Google.com, that sort of thing.

Predictive text as well. Probably another reason why I get by in life is predictive text. However, I'm a fast typer, so my spelling and autocorrect fails me in that sense. So, you can't always trust predictive text.

Voice recognition software, as well, can help dictate on your phone. Again, on Word document, you've got the detector button so you can speak out loud and it'll write it for you as you speak. There’s different apps that can help you with that as well.

Also, there is something called My Computer My Way. If you Google: My Computer My Way, it's on the Ability Net website, and it's got loads of articles explaining how to use different accessibility features and things like that on your devices, your laptop, your mobiles, things like that.

It talks about vision, hearing, motor, cognitive, all these different adjustments that you can make and there's all free tips and advice on there, and it gives you all the free platforms as well to download.

Other Resources

Also, there's loads of useful contacts to help you. Not only do you have your university, who have hopefully got all the contacts and the disability support for you, you also have free software that you might be able to download on your student accounts.

There are some other useful resources. The British Dyslexia Association is just one of them. You've got Call Scotland if you're based up in Scotland. Dyslexia Action and Dyslexia Association too, so have a look at all those websites as well.

I hope this video has given you some insight into dyslexia, some of the signs, the symptoms, and some tips and advice to help you along the way if you do think that you have dyslexia, or if you have dyslexia and you just want some more advice, hopefully this has helped you somewhere.

Please, if you suspect you do have dyslexia, go and get an assessment and get the support that you need and deserve to help you succeed like everybody else.