My father, Sam Ayer, who has died aged 81, dedicated his life to the care and support of vulnerable children and adults. His research made a significant contribution to a shift in services from institutional to community care. His doctoral thesis, Community Care and the Mentally Handicapped (1984), highlighted the key role mothers play in providing care for children with learning disabilities, and he played a key role in the English National Board for Nursing and Midwifery’s research programme into the development of nursing for people with learning disabilities.
Born in Akropong, Ghana, Sam lived for most of his life in Britain, but he was proud of his Ghanaian heritage and continued to speak his native language, Twi, with family and friends. His mother, Emma Abena Sika, was a housewife and his father, Frederick Anim Gyekete, was a farmer. After attending the Methodist school in Akropong, Sam trained as a teacher at the town’s Presbyterian Training College (now the Presbyterian College of Education). Committed to improving the lives of visually impaired students, he became a specialist in teaching blind children.
In 1970, when he was 27, he travelled to the UK to train as a nurse at South Ockenden hospital, Essex. During a visit to Ghana in 1983, he met Lucy Yirenkyi, a timekeeper. They had a customary marriage in Ghana and later a civil marriage at the register office in Hull, east Yorkshire, in 1985.
Sam enthusiastically embraced any and all opportunities. In 1973, he started working as a staff nurse at South Ockendon hospital, which treated patients with severe learning difficulties. By 1976, he was the officer in charge at the Swansea Children’s Unit while studying for a BA in economics at the city’s university.
His experience and impressive academic qualifications earned him a Social Science Research Council doctoral studentship at the University of Hull. In 1982, he became one of the first learning disability nurses to be awarded a PhD, and he used his expertise to develop nurse education.
He was later appointed to a lectureship at the Humberside College of Health, which became the University of Hull School of Nursing, and retired in 2008 – but this was not the end of his academic career. In 2015 he was invited by the new Ghana Baptist University College, in Kumasi, to establish a school of nursing. He spent three years as the dean of nursing, where he developed the nursing programme, returning to the UK before the Covid-19 pandemic began.
Sam is survived by Lucy and their three children – his sons, Frederick and Jonathan, and me – and by Emma, his daughter from his first marriage, to Janet Quartey, which ended in divorce in 1968.
