Spotlight on Northern Ireland

With its beautiful coastline, engineering heritage and famous hospitals, Northern Ireland has nurtured and produced several important nurse leaders.

After the 1914-18 war Miss AE Musson, a noted member of both the early RCN and the General Nursing Council, became the Assistant and then Assistant Matron at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. Miss Musson also became the first RCN Committee Chair of Northern Ireland in 1943.

Dr Mona Grey (1910-2009) was born and brought up in India, and trained at the London Hospital, but she made Northern Ireland her home, becoming an inspirational leader whose vision and commitment to nurse education led to the RCN establishing a permanent office and teaching centre in Belfast.

Dr Grey was also an entrepreneur, securing patronage to support many RCN activities, and in later years she herself became a generous patron to nursing scholars and nursing history. She had a sense of occasion, panache and creativity which she continued to demonstrate well into her 90s.

Autumn events

Veteran BBC broadcaster Walter Love will pay tribute to Mona Grey at the annual Northern Ireland History of Nursing Society conference this autumn.

Also this autumn Professor Ann Marie Rafferty, Dean of the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery, is giving the Winifred Raphael Memorial Lecture hosted by the RCN Research Society in Belfast on 27 October at the Wellington Park Hotel. Professor Rafferty has chosen a historical analysis of the nursing workforce and health outcomes as her focus.