An oral history project in mental health nursing

The main aim of this study was to produce material which would support, or alternatively challenge the content of a piece of historical writing, based largely on primary archival sources. The method chosen was to replicate and develop an earlier oral history project, which was carried out to discover and report on trained nurses who could offer their impressions of both the practical and theoretical frameworks of psychiatric care. The work described here took that project a stage further by focusing on a single organization, and developing the line of inquiry by adding topics of contemporary interest, such as gender issues, ethnicity, the management of violence and nurses' roles in treatment. Apart from comparisons and contrasts with the previous study, subsidiary interest was to reflect on the intrinsic value and continuing relevance of the material, or the lack of it. The process section considers the problems and dynamics of the interview situation, and how this may have affected the material produced and what this implied for the interpretation. The study confirms an assumption of the usefulness of oral history, as a record, additional to the written documents, which enriches the descriptions of historical processes.