Our work

We are the mental health forum of the Royal College of Nursing, and as such, our role is to represent mental health nursing and all things mental health within the broader family of the RCN. Co-production is central to everything we do, producing resources for your professional development and campaigning for better policy locally and nationally.

This end-of-year report of the Mental Health Forum demonstrates the various projects and workstreams in which the steering group and colleagues have engaged over the past year. Our work this year shows how we are an environment for forum members to network, share ideas, inform and influence practice, research and education while lobbying and developing national policy and legislation.

We want to thank Becky Hoskins, who has been a long-standing member of the forum and stepped down in December 2022 after two full terms of work in the forum. We will miss our Congress Guru, but delighted that Becky is staying with us as an expert representative.

After a competitive round of applications and interviews, we have successfully appointed three vacancies on the steering group. We want to congratulate Laura Daukintis and Ellie Gordon, who will continue as Chair of the forum, and welcome Zeba Arif as a new committee member.

Being a steering committee member is one of many ways you can work with and support the forum to develop and shape mental health nursing.

As forum members, you are an essential part of our network, and we regularly rely upon and ask for support from forum members such as yourselves to help us progress our work. So, if you want to be more actively involved in our work, please get in touch with us through our forum pages.

This has been another busy year for the forum. We have continued collaborating with DHSC to inform and shape the refreshed Mental Health Act (2022). We ensured that the mental health nursing voice was heard and used to influence the shape of this Act and the roles and responsibilities of prescribed fist level nurses in the Act itself.

We have also strengthened our links with the One Voice collaborative (need detail of who they are), with whom we are working to address cultural issues across all working environments.
The year 2022 saw the launch of our lived experience reference group. This is to ensure that in all that we do, we hear from nurses who have lived the experience of being cared for by mental health nurses, so all our work has this lens and input into it.

Several other projects and consultations have shaped the development of mental health nursing and nursing careers as we worked together with various organisations. Co-production with nurses is central to everything we do. We have resources for nurses’ professional development and campaigning for a policy recognising mental health nurses' essential and unique contributions locally and nationally.

We have active pages on the website where we share work we have underway, consultations we would like our members to get involved with, and recordings of recent events: Mental Health Forum. A further resource, the Mental health clinical topic specialist area, contains information and resources relevant to mental health professionals.

As part of our continued focus on ensuring that mental health nurses are supported and developed to have positive careers in this field, We co-hosted with HEE an event to highlight a senior nurse-specific role, which is one of the statutory roles for prescribed first level (MH and LD) nurses in the MHA. That is the role of the Approved clinician. This was a chance to work with nurses who are both established in this role and those who aspire to it. We had an attendance of over 300 nurses at this event and are now developing plans to continue to provide support and guidance for nurses interested in this role.

On world suicide prevention day, in recognition of increasing awareness of the much-publicised increase in suicidality amongst nurses, particularly mental health nurses, we hosted an awareness-raising event. This was created to raise the profile of the level of risk of suicide across the profession, as well as sources of support available to members struggling with this issue available from the RCN.

Over this past year, we have become increasingly aware of the significant stress and distress experienced by the nursing workforce, which is emerging as an increased level of sickness (often related to mental ill health) across the nursing profession. Coupled with rising levels of nurses leaving the workforce, mental stress and distress are often cited as reasons for leaving the job.

This is one of the reasons we decided to become a formal member of the One Voice collaborative; this is a group of member-led organisations with the sole focus of providing support for the health and social care workforce. As a Mental Health forum, we hosted the first One Voice event in September of this year, titled Distress here and now: thriving in adversity - this event showed the level of distress across the health and social care workforce. It started to outline ways in which we can address this. We continue to work with One Voice colleagues to progress this vital message.

Delayed from December due to industrial action, we plan to hold a cost of living event in January 2023, highlighting the support offered to RCN members and staff to help with the cost of living crisis.

Links to recordings of these events can be found on our forum pages.

Our Ethnic Minority sub-group continues to build on its initial success. Chaired by Dr Ann Mitchell, this group continues to raise awareness of and share ways to reduce and remove the barriers experienced by ethnic minority mental health nurses to have positive and fulfilling careers. An in-depth literature review and ethnographic research are being developed to understand this issue in more detail and identify ways barriers can be removed. In addition, work is also underway to host an event to understand better the challenges faced by IR colleagues in mental health.

We continue to work with nurses who are forum members and who have lived experience of mental ill health and mental health services to ensure that this voice of lived experience informs and shapes our work.

Currently, we have a piece of work underway to establish the evidence base of the most impactive interventions that can be offered to people at a time of mental health crisis, as we are planning to develop a quick access tool to support nurses in ED to meet the needs of people in a mental health crisis. This is being developed in collaboration with cross-forum colleagues in urgent and emergency care.

The forum was a core stakeholder of the Baroness Mary Watkins of Tavistock’s review of mental health nursing in England. A report that HEE published in the spring of 2022 provides a blueprint for the future of the mental health nursing workforce. Now that this work is in the implementation stages, the forum continues to be a key stakeholder in this work.

Members of the forum contributed to the formation of the following national policy initiatives:

• Royal College of Nursing (2022), Position Statement on Clinical Supervision. London: Royal College of Nursing
• Royal College of Nursing (2022), Response to The Department of Health and Social Care Ten-Year Mental Health Plan Call for Evidence. London: Royal College of Nursing
• Health Education England (2022), Commitment and Growth: advancing mental health nursing now and for the future. London: HEE

On Wednesday, 16 November 2022, the RCN gave oral evidence to the Joint Committee on the Draft Mental Health Bill in England and Wales after submitting written evidence. The Joint Committee comprises MPs and members of the House of Lords and has held several oral evidence sessions from stakeholders, including from the criminal justice system, NHS leaders, people with lived experience of being detained under the Mental Health Act, and Royal Colleges. Carol Webley-Brown, Council Member, represented the Royal College of Nursing.

A transcript of the session has been published. You can rewatch the session online. We spoke candidly about the challenges nurses face within these services, including understaffing, burnout, worries about patient outcomes, and the continued racial inequalities resulting from the existing Mental Health Act. We told the Joint Committee about how many mental health nurses feel undervalued in their roles and the importance of nursing leadership:

“When nurses work very hard and get up to consultant level, they are not valued enough to do what they need to do for their patients, by which I mean that if we are prescribing nurses, we still need a doctor to sign off things. It is not that we do not like our colleagues - I love them very much - but we need to be seen in our own right as professionals and to be valued. We can make a definite difference in the workplace and community.”

While speaking about the racial inequalities in mental health services, we made clear to the Joint Committee that unless there is an anti-racism approach taken throughout any legislative changes to the Mental Health Act, these inequalities will continue.

“Who is more detained than others is visible without collecting the data. Unless you have anti-racism threading through the legislation, we will not solve the problem. A lot of the structures and systems mean that it leans heavily on that racialised group. Until you unpick the things that seem to weigh heavily on those individuals, it will not change. More choice, greater use of the community and people who serve and deliver the services looking as they do will make a difference because you have a better understanding if you come from the same or similar background.”

We have an FGG bit in progress to commence the in-depth literature review and aligned research looking at the barriers experienced by ethnic minority nurses to career development.
Our lived experience sub-group works with urgent and emergency care forum members to identify and share learning and development opportunities. In addition, our lived experience subgroup is linked with RCN learning disability and community and end-of-life care to develop work concerning hospice nursing.

We have a forum development day booked for the 20 January 2023 to reflect on work to date and shape our business planning and strategy development across 2023.

Report prepared by:

Ellie Gordon (Forum Chair)
Ann Mitchel (Chair of the ethnic minorities sub-committee)

19 December 2022