June 2021 brought both the International Mental Health Nursing Research Conference and the summer 2021 meeting of Mental Health Nurse Academics UK (MHNAUK). Unsurprisingly given the ongoing pandemic, both happened online, with #MHNR2021 again run as a collaboration between MHNAUK and the Royal College of Nursing.

In the event I was able to make less of the conference than I had intended, but I did have the opportunity to co-present a paper with Michael Coffey titled Involving stakeholders and widening the net: reflections on going beyond database searching arising from an evidence synthesis in the area of end of life care for people with severe mental illness. Our presentation arose from the MENLOC study, and specifically addressed the incorporation of non-research materials in evidence syntheses and the value of directly working with people with experience of the field. Here’s a link to the recording we made, on behalf of the whole project team:

At June’s MHNAUK meeting the group heard from Dr Crystal Oldman, of the Queen’s Nursing Institute, who spoke about specialist practice qualifications. Updates from colleagues across the four countries of the UK were followed by meetings of each of MHNAUK’s standing groups, where in the Research group we talked (amongst other things) about the importance of growing capacity in mental health nursing research. Elsewhere in the whole-group meeting we heard of plans to seek charitible status for MHNAUK: an exciting move, in my view.

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