Gary Winship appointed 2021 Skellern Lecturer

Congratulations to Dr Gary Winship who has been appointed as the 2021 Skellern Lecturer. 

The Skellern Lecture is a highly prestige annual event, often described as the Reith Lecture for mental health nurses.  It was established in 1980 in order to remember the contribution of Eileen Skellern who was an influential figure in shaping the modern profession of mental health nursing in the UK.  Previous Skellern lecturers have included Professor Annie Altschul and Baroness Caroline Cox among others and there have also been two previous University of Nottingham laureates, Julie Repper (2006) and Patrick Callaghan (2011). 

This year Gary Winship was one of four shortlisted candidates who submitted lecture proposals to the panel.  The panel consists of senior academic colleagues, former Skellern lecturers, Wiley/Blackwell Lifetime Award recipients, representatives from NHS MH Trusts, Mental Health Nurse Academics UK and board members for the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing.  The panel includes Professor Tony Butterworth, Professor Hugh Mckenna and international colleagues including Professor Shirley Smoyak (USA) and Professor Cheryl Forchuk (Canada). 

Gary says “I am exceedingly honoured and humbled to be bestowed with this award. I would like to congratulate the other candidates on being shortlisted

• Dr Celeste Foster, Senior Lecturer in adolescent mental health at the University of Salford
• Dr Judith Graham, Queens Nurse RNMH, Director for Psychological Professionals at Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Anthony O’Brien, Associate Professor, University of Waikato, New Zealand  

All of their proposed lecture synopses (which you can read on the Skellen Lecture website ) would have merited appointment.  MHNs and allied front-line professionals are working under extreme duress, and my lecture will draw attention to those who are working in the eye of the COVID storm, saving lives and bearing witness”.

Gary's synopsis

The Modern Mental Health Nurse, Where Now for Skellern’s Vision? How does Skellern’s vision of a modern mental health nurse - dynamically informed, democratically committed and compassionately focused – bear scrutiny today?

Arguably, there is much to esteem, for example the on-going influence of the Cassel Hospital (where Eileen Skellern began her journey), or perhaps the psychoanalytically informed Halliwick Day Hospital that Marion Janner described as the model for her first iteration of Star Wards. The front-line psychodynamic work of nurses like Anne Aiyebusi, Marcus Evans, Celeste Foster also highlight the psychodynamic legacy of Skellern. Skellern’s influence is arguably felt in the emancipatory practices of Recovery Colleges (Julie Repper being a direct descendant of Skellern at the Maudsley), and in the fact the first professor of democratic mental health in the UK is a MHN (Mick Mckeown). 

This lecture will offer a brief route map to Skellern’s Therapeutic Community journey, starting at the Cassel Hospital through to her work at the Henderson (where Maxwell Jones dedicated his 1968 landmark book Social Psychiatry, "to the work of Eileen Skellern and the other nurses at the Henderson”), finally, reflecting on Skellern’s leadership in establishing the Charles Hood Therapeutic Community at Bethlem in the late 1970s, where we can see the culmination of her vision for MHN practice. The critical question going forward is how can Skellern’s modern mental health nurse be consolidated and advanced?  

This lecture will propose an ideological tripod for re-envisioning the modern MHN comprising of core attributes tallied to:

1. renewed communitarian practices, democratic and psychosocially informed
2. interpersonal skills honed for navigating sustained therapeutic intimacy with people in distress
3. co-operative participatory cycles of privileging service user voice through qualitative research

I will point to examples of dynamic relational education that can enhance the process of learning the art and craft of how to be alongside people who are hurting, and finally I will set out the groundwork processes of supervision and personal development that continue at the heart of my own practice as a MHN.