Three members of staff who work in mental health services are featured in a series of new videos produced for the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Scotland.
The experiences of Healthcare Assistant Mary McMeekin, Senior Charge Nurse Ross Cheape and Student Mental Health Nurse Connor Kennedy highlight how nurses and healthcare support workers help people achieve recovery and better outcomes. They show how mental health nursing, once regarded as a ‘Cinderella service’, has been completely transformed with the vast majority of mental health nurses now working in the community as part of multidisciplinary teams.
The films were made to illustrate a report from the RCN in Scotland which concluded that people leading Scotland’s new Health and Social Care Partnerships could learn a lot from how change was managed when the country’s mental health services shifted from large institutions to community-based services, with the person at the centre of care.
Although great strides forward have been made, Student Nurse Connor Kennedy says there is still an unspoken rule that people have to be strong and stay silent. It is this kind of stigma, he argues, that can result in mental illness or suicide. The main way to tackle this, he advocates, is to have everyone talking openly about what mental health is, and what it does to someone. You can watch the videos on the multimedia section of the NHS Forth Valley website www.nhsforthvalley.com/multimedia
