Professor Irene Tuffrey-Wijne

Irene holds the world’s first Chair of Intellectual Disability and Palliative Care. She qualified as a nurse in Amsterdam before moving to London in 1985, where she lived and worked in the L’Arche Community for people with learning disability and then as a ward nurse and community nurse specialist at Trinity Hospice (Clapham). Since 2001, she has led a research and development programme focusing on learning disability, bereavement, and palliative care at St George’s University of London and later at Kingston University London. She completed her PhD in 2007 at Maastricht University (Netherlands).

Irene researches the experiences of people with learning disabilities around dying, death and bereavement; communication and breaking bad news to people with learning disabilities; and the provision of palliative care, including end-of-life care planning. She includes people with a learning disability as study participants and salaried researchers, a practice which led Kingston University to win the “Employer of People with Disabilities” category in the 2023 National Learning Disability & Autism awards. They host the “Yellow Tulip Group”, an online learning disability research group.

Irene chairs the Reference Group for Intellectual Disabilities of the European Association of Palliative Care, working with colleagues from across Europe. She won the 2017 EAPC Post-Doctoral Research Award and was named “Pioneering Nurse” in the St Christopher’s 2020 Palliative Nursing Awards. She is a founding trustee of the UK-based (but international) Palliative Care of People with Learning Disabilities Network (www.pcpld.org), which she chaired until 2020.