Mental Health Nursing Cohort Connect Day,
24 May 2019,
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
Anglia Ruskin University's Young Street Building |
I'm not sure if I completely
met this brief, but I was delighted to speak to an enthusiastic and engaged
audience of students and mental health nursing academics at the end of May. I
was made to feel very welcome on what was my first visit to Anglia Ruskin University,
and was even given a guided tour of the impressive Young Street building. I had
the pleasure of meeting and hearing some of the other speakers at the Cohort
Connect Day. Among these were Nina Bailey - a learning disabilities nurse from
the Huntercombe Group - and Sharon Gilfoyle - Head of Recovery and Resilience
at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and also a consultant
with ImROC (Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change.) Sharon's talk
reminded me of some training I had received from ImROC a few years back, which
was instrumental in our decision to employ Peer Support Workers in the Early
Intervention Service I then managed.
The word 'synergies' is a bit
over-used these days, but it struck me there were a lot of deep connections
between what we were all saying. Nina spoke about Positive Behaviour Management
and supporting people to make choices and have opportunities, Sharon remarked
how peer support workers can bring about change in organisational culture and I
talked about transforming the organisational culture of mental health care
through creativity. One of the students suggested we could avoid risk
management becoming a stumbling block in mental health care by, instead,
stressing the value of improvisation. This, of course, was music to my ears.
When Carson et al., (2003) discuss risk-taking in the context of
family therapy they don't mean engaging in dangerous activities but responding
intuitively to clients, being "in the moment" and "thinking on
one's feet", all aspects of improvisation. Sawyer (2012) describes how
improvising jazz groups create a product which is both unpredictable and yet
more suitable to the purpose and hence, as the Anglia Ruskin student intuited,
there is great value in mental health practitioners - and service users - being
open to improvisation.
Many thanks to Mark and his fellow students and to Pepsi Takawira (Senior Lecturer/Course Leader) and
colleagues at Anglia Ruskin University for making my visit to Cambridge so
enjoyable and rewarding.
References
Carson, D.K, Becker, K.W., Vance, K.E. & Forth, N.L. (2003).
The role of creativity in marriage and family therapy practice: A national
online study. Contemporary Family Therapy, 25 (1), 89-109.
Sawyer, R K. (2012). Explaining creativity: The science
of human innovation. (2nd ed.) Oxford:
Oxford University Press.