Oral history collection

In 2008 the RCN Archives department received heritage lottery funding under the My Heritage grant scheme to improve access to a vast collection of oral history interviews recorded with nurses over the last 20 years.

Over 700 hours of recordings take you into the lives and experiences of individual nurses dating from the early 20th to the 21st centuries, through two world wars, breakthrough medical developments, the beginnings of the NHS and great social changes. Leaders of the nursing profession are represented alongside ordinary nurses working in every field of nursing across the UK.

The RCN Archives department worked with the heritage charity group, the Living Memory Association, on community and volunteer involvement for the project. The transcriptions produced by the project have provided the oral history information available in the archives catalogue.

For more information about these recordings and other interviews, go to the archives catalogue.

Contact the archives department staff by sending an email to archives@rcn.org.uk for further information or advice on how to access the recordings and transcriptions.

The oral history collection is a research resource which has been used in many pubications. For example, Sisters: Memories from the Courageous Nurses of World War Two by Dr Barbara Mortimer in association with the RCN which contains first hand accounts of wartime experiences from nurses: military, civilian, those in occupied territory and refugee nurses. Published by Hutchison 2012.