Essentials of Mental Health Nursing (PDF)

Karen Wright is the Head of School of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire, in Preston, in the North-West of England. She established a clinical career before entering academia moving from Cardiothoracic surgical nursing to mental health nursing in 1986. Since then she has established a number of innovative and research informed services including a palliative care unit for end of life care for Alzheimer’s sufferers, developed and run Crisis Services and was Nurse Consultant for Personality Disorder for Merseycare NHS Trust. She wrote the first MSc for Personality Disorder in 2003 which still holds National acclaim and has developed a number of nursing curricula including the MSc Nursing (pre-reg/ adult & MH). Karen has been PI on a number of qualitative research projects aimed at providing insight into the experience of both care and of education. Her research into how the police assess individuals with mental disorder resulted in the establishment of the Public Psychiatric Emergency Assessment Tool (PPEAT), which has been adopted by the College of Policing and has been cited in DoH documents including Closing the Gap and the Crisis Concordat  

Mick McKeown is Reader in Democratic Mental Health, School of Nursing at the University of Central Lancashire and trade union activist with Unison. He is supporting service user and carer involvement at the university and union strategizing on nursing. He has taken a lead in making the case for union organising to extend to alliance formation with service users/survivors.