Connecting in Cambridge

Mental Health Nursing Cohort Connect Day, 

24 May 2019, 

Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

Anglia Ruskin University's
Young Street Building

Back in February, I was contacted by an enterprising mental health nursing student called Mark Lecomber. Mark was in the final year of his course at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and he'd become aware of my work on creativity and mental health while doing a literature review on arts on prescription. He, along with some other third year nursing students, also happened to be involved in putting together an event called a Cohort Connect Day in which the student mental health nurses from years one, two and three of the course would come together, and Mark wondered if I'd come over to Cambridge to speak about the value of creativity and how it has shaped and informed my role as a mental health nurse. 

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.