Changing mental health nursing
Following up on her September interview in Mental Health Practice, Felicity Stockwell bemoans how little her work has changed mental health nursing practice.
For many nurses, Felicity Stockwell’s study, The Unpopular Patient has changed nursing from task-based to patient-centred care. But she is still waiting for it to have an impact on mental health nursing.
When the RCN started its research project, Study of Nursing Care, in 1966, I was not eligible to take part because I was a mental health nurse. The project was to develop the quality of general nursing. However, because I was in the RCN, and had been invited to participate in an informal nursing research group for senior nurses I was included, even though I was a mental health tutor. It was for this project that I wrote The Unpopular Patient, published in 1972.
...