Get involved
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!
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 | Blog | Royal College of Nursing
Our 2026 Committee lead is xxxx xxxx
If you are interested in joining us or finding out more, please email 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 have been given funding by Forums Governance Group for member travel and interview transcriptions. 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 is xxxx xxxx
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 is xxxx xxxx
If you are interested in becoming an interviewer, or in being interviewed please email honf@rcn.org.uk putting HIVStory in the subject line.
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.
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. The 2026 committee lead for this is xxx
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.
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 physical 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 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.
