Growing a team that shape thinking around mental health
We’re a close-knit team of professors, readers, lecturers, teaching fellows, lecturer/practitioners and clinical teachers. Visiting lecturers also share their expertise with us and our students. We're all either mental health nurses or allied psychological health professionals with a vast range of clinical experience, which underpins our research-informed teaching.
Together, we influence, support and educate to give people the skills they need to help those living with mental illness, their families and communities.
Many members of the Department have national and international recognition as world leaders in their field of practice and have been selected for fellowship of various learned societies and academies. The teaching philosophy of the department is student-led learning theoretically rooted in humanism. Humanist education aims to enable learners to express their own needs and interests, building their self-efficacy, independence and creative energy. Through this humanistic framework we strive to celebrate diversity, promote inclusivity and display compassion and empathy to create an open classroom, where we can become structuring agents facilitating students’ responsibility for learning. By crafting an atmosphere where students appreciate their potential to learn and are excited about learning, they begin to realise their role, responsibility and capacity to take charge of their own education.
Our students are taught by the people that write their textbooks – The Art & Science of Mental Health Nursing, one of the most comprehensive books in the field, is edited by Emeritus Professor, Ian Norman, and nearly half the chapters are written by the team. Our Head of Department, Dr Tommy Dickinson is currently co-editing the second edition of Mental Health Nursing Skills with many of the chapters written by our team.
Understanding mental healthcare through patient experience
Our research gives people a voice and helps us listen to the groups that are “hard to hear”. This involves working with people in recovery to champion putting people who are experts by experience at the centre of our research.
The Mental Health Nursing Research Group in our Division of Care for Long Term Conditions runs a programme of high-quality research with the aim of improving the delivery and experience of mental healthcare and mental health nursing across a range of service settings. Staff work across our Faculty as well as the Health Service and Population Research Department in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.