Want to be an active history of nursing forum member but don’t know how to get started?

Here are our 2026-2027 activities, with details of what’s involved and how to get onboard. There’s something for everyone.

The History of Nursing Forum has a history of collaborating closely with our RCN Archive team. This includes volunteering, either onsite or online.

Online activity might include listening to oral histories and writing summaries to help researching; writing short biographical profiles of nurses found in our archives; writing descriptions of images, such as of our photographs or postcard collections.

Onsite activity is based in our Edinburgh office and suits members who are physically close to the office. Volunteers usually agree a weekly slot with the team (usually a morning or an afternoon session). Activities might include repackaging so that the records are in conservation grade boxes and files; some listing of badges or photographs; or writing summary descriptions of records.

The archive team ask that volunteers are History of Nursing Forum Members and that we sign up to at least 10 volunteer sessions. This enables staff to train us up, and for volunteers to enjoy completing a project.

Some of our archive volunteers have supported the archive over many years, finding it immensely rewarding. We thank them for their huge contribution.

If you want to find out more, please email us at honf@rcn.org.uk.

We have several local history of nursing groups. Here is an overview of the groups, their activities and how you can get involved. Please email honf@rcn.org.uk if you have a question for one of the groups or want to find out more.

London, East and South-East Region

Meet at London HQ, 20 Cavendish Square, quarterly, where they have speakers and discussions.

Lead - Glynis Meredith-Windle

North-West Region

A public group of volunteers, mostly retired nurses and social workers, help at the University of Chester's Riverside Museum, welcoming visitors and booked groups and giving tours. They also organise and host a free monthly talk on the first Wednesday of each month during the university term (4-5.30pm) on a variety of topics from the history of health and social care.

Lead – Claire Chatterton or contact fhsc.histsoc@chester.ac.uk

Scotland

Scotland: Forum members often attend the exhibition and events, as well as volunteering with the Archive. Members would like to build upon these networking opportunities in 2026.

Lead – Alison O’Donnell

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland: A Network meets at Belfast HQ to discuss the history of nursing, and to work on projects. Recent projects have included the WW2 book. Their current project is on the history of cardiac care.

Lead – Margaret Graham

Every year we collaborate with the RCN Library and Museum and other forums to create exhibitions and events. We create opportunities for members and the public to access these both onsite and online.

Our exhibitions are an important way for us to explore our profession and share our story. Our events enable us to hear from experts in history and contemporary practice, a wonderful opportunity for us to communally reflect on our practice.

Our 2025/2026 exhibitions are: 

The Art of Nursing: Creativity, Resistance, Renewal (online and in London HQ)

Prison Nursing Unlocked: A history of care and justice (online and in London HQ)

You Mean the World: Nursing in a Climate Crisis (online and in Edinburgh HQ)

In March we will launch our Nursing and Migration exhibition. You can see full details of current exhibitions and links to our past exhibitions.

Events

Find our about our future events including booking details.

Catch up with our past events – great viewing.

Want to get involved?

Please visit our exhibitions in person or online and come along to our events. This is a valuable way to support the Forum.

Our Chair circulates a call for volunteers via their email and via HONF blogs. Work on our exhibitions starts about a year before they are launched. Ideas for future exhibitions are discussed about two years before the launch.

For more information, questions or suggestions, please email us at honf@rcn.org.uk. 

We meet online quarterly to share progress, get help and advice, and discuss who we are next interviewing. There is a dedicated Microsoft Teams group hosting guides, training resources and a place to ask questions and share experiences. Online training is provided by the Archive team by arrangement.

History of Nursing Forum members began interviewing people about nursing in 1986. Since then, we have deposited over 600 interviews with the RCN Archive, alongside interviews that have been deposited from research projects. You can find out more from the archive catalogue Royal College of Nursing Oral History Collection or by reading this article The Voice of Nursing – 30 years of UK Nurses’ Oral Histories – The UKAHN Bulletin.

Interviews are carried out face-to-face using a hand-held recorder. This is so that we can get a robust audio file which can be preserved in the archive. It also gives us a valuable opportunity to meet each other in person and take the time to appreciate listening to someone else's lived experience.

We would love to have an interviewer from each of the countries and regions, so that we can ensure a UK-wide representation of interviews. We aim to interview from across the nursing profession – whichever care-setting, specialism, or level of nursing – with a range of lived experiences and diverse backgrounds.

In 2025 we were funded by Forums Coordinating Committee for member travel and interview transcriptions. As at January 2026 we await our funding bid outcome for the coming year. Our priority themes for interviews have been interviewing people with stories of migration and to continue to build our RCN Fellows’ collection.

Our 2026 Committee lead for this activity is Dianne Yarwood.

If you are interested in becoming an interviewer, or in being interviewed please email honf@rcn.org.uk.

Our volunteer-interviewers meet online monthly for support and advice. There is a dedicated Microsoft Teams group hosting guides, training resources and a place to ask questions and share experiences.

The RCN History of Nursing Forum (HONF) is partnering with the National HIV Story Trust (NHST) on a three-year contemporary collecting project ‘HIVStory’. We aim to ensure that the stories of those who nursed/cared for people with HIV/AIDS are collected and shared, both now and in the future. We are keen to capture the full range of nursing/caring staff, be they midwives, health visitors, support workers or managers.

In January 2025, following a UK wide promotion of the project, a team of nine volunteers came together for the launch meeting of the project. They are now busily meeting and interviewing people with experiences of nursing in the 1980s-1990s. Although training has been delivered online, the interviews are being conducted in person, at or near an agreed workplace or home.

Our partner, NHST, films, records, and preserves the stories of survivors, families, partners, and medical professionals affected by the AIDS pandemic. To date NHST has published individual stories remembering the 40-year history of HIV, as Love, Life and Loss. Real Stories from the AIDS Pandemic, copies available to members from RCN Libraries.

Our audio interviews and any written submissions are being deposited with RCN Archives, alongside our main Oral History collection. In addition, the filmed interviews from this project will be held at The London Archives as part of the NHST archive, to ensure that nursing experiences are visible.

Commitments

All volunteers attend the on-line training sessions and monthly workshops. We each planned to conduct at least two interviews in the first six months of 2025. There will also be opportunities to continue with oral history activity after 2026.

First Wednesday of each month, 1pm - 2pm with an extended evaluation and planning meeting on Wednesday 3rd December 2025 12.30pm - 2pm.

Our 2026 Committee lead for this activity is Victoria Sweetmore.

If you are interested in becoming an interviewer, or in being interviewed please email honf@rcn.org.uk putting HIVStory in the subject line.

Join our Forum Facebook group. This is a ‘closed group’ for members that shares thoughts, links, ideas on all things related to the history of nursing.

Follow our Forum on Bluesky where we share news about our events.

If you are on other forms of social media, please use #HistNursing so others can see and share your content.

Blogs are a wonderful way of highlighting member activity around the UK. If you are doing any nursing history research, for example family and local history, a commemoration activity about a nurse or a hospital we’d love to hear about it. Our published HoNF blogs can be seen here and include stories from our groups and from individual researchers.

Our 2026 Committee lead for Blogs is Nicola Ring.

If you are interested in writing a blog please email honf@rcn.org.uk for more information.

Are you interested in tracing a nurse from the past? Maybe a family member, someone important to your field of practice, or who nursed at a significant point in our history?

Or are you interested in local history? Perhaps a history of a hospital? Or the history of a local nursing association? Or how a field of nursing practice developed?

Are you wondering where to start looking?

Our Tracing Nurses: A guide to British nursing sources for researching family and local history is here to help you.

With so many digitised resources now available, historical research has become much more accessible to everyone. The challenge is where to start: The guide starts with the basics - does a family member have some memorabilia, a hospital badge, a training certificate, and moves on to the cornucopia of online resources (registers of nurses, historical nursing journals, oral histories) and locations of non-digital archives. The guide is accompanied by a step-by-step guide on how to search nursing registers on Ancestry (which includes top tips for searching place names).

The guide is reviewed on an annual basis.

Our 2026 Committee lead for this activity is Seán Graffin.

Please contact us if you have any suggestions for, or questions about, the guide. Also, we’d love to hear from you and share the stories you find through our blogs.

Please email us at honf@rcn.org.uk.

We need your help.

We need to ensure websites about nursing in the UK are preserved for the future.

During the 2020 International Year of the Nurse and Midwife, the History of Nursing Forum worked with the British Library to create a collection of over 100 nursing websites. This complements our own digital collections held by the RCN Archive.

Every year we review the collection and nominate additions to the collection. The Nursing Collection now holds over 300 UK nursing websites. These represent nursing organisations, specialist networks, charities, communities of nurses from diverse backgrounds, and of individuals.

To be included, the website must be active, about nursing, and in the UK. Sadly, websites behind logins and Facebook cannot be collected.

The 2024 cyber-attack on the British Library means that the collection is no longer available online; this underlines the fragility of our online legacy and the need for this work to continue. Our Nursing collection is safely preserved, with websites being actively added to it. Our colleagues at the British Library are investigating more robust ways to access the collection.

We keep track of the websites that have been nominated on our handy list of nursing organisations in the United Kingdom on Wikipedia.

If you want to nominate a nursing website account, you can email honf@rcn.org.uk.

We meet online once a month to share our progress, get advice and help and discuss nurses in history. There is a dedicated Microsoft Teams group hosting guides, training resources and a place to ask questions and share experiences. In the Spring we run online introductory sessions, inviting HONF members from across the UK to join the group; but you can join us all year round.

We call ourselves ‘Nurses in Red’ as nurses with no Wikipedia article show up in articles as a broken ‘red’ link. Wikipedia is an international, volunteer written, encyclopaedia in which articles about men greatly outnumber women. Of the biographical articles in English, only 20% are of women. Nurses and nursing, a predominantly but not exclusively female profession, are often missing from the history of health care on Wikipedia.

We started in 2022 using the RCN Library and Archive collections, aiming to write nurses back into public history on Wikipedia. Our group is supported by our Professional Lead for History of Nursing and a Wikimedian who advise on research, sources, writing and editing Wikipedia entries.

Since the project began we have added 90 new history of nursing articles and improved 683 existing articles by adding nursing history details to them and had over 24 million public views of our articles.

In 2023, The HONF Nurses in Red project won the UK Wikipedian award for Partnership of the Year. In 2024 Nurses in Red presented their work at the UK Association of the History of Nursing colloquium and published it in the UKAHN Bulletin Just a Nurse – The UKAHN Bulletin: ISSN 2049-9744. And at RCN Congress 2025 Sarah Rogers received a commendation as Forum member of the year for her huge contribution to Nurses in Red.

Read more in our January 2025 blog shared some of our volunteers' experiences: Nurses in Red - putting nurses back into history

Our 2026 Committee lead for this activity is Vari Drennan.

If you are interested in joining us or finding out more, please email honf@rcn.org.uk.