Hi everyone! Today we had three very nice and informative lectures! Our first lecture was about what it is like to be a school nurse in the UK. School nurses here are not a protected title, therefore anyone can call themselves a school nurse. They are working on changing this to become a protected title to help support the families to better engage with professionals and make sure they have the proper training.They strive to provide an education for young people on how to take care of themselves and protect their wellbeing. Many school nurses placed in the schools are only trained in first aid to take care of scrapes and small things. There is a  35% decline  of school nurses and they are currently struggling to provide a decent quality of care to the kids. The nurses are also trained to be able to provide mental health services such as how to manage panic attacks. They are more like community nurses who do way more than our school nurses. They are the ones who teach the kids health instead of the gym teachers like I had. 

I was also surprised to learn that criminal exploitation is rapidly increasing in the UK. This is when vulnerable kids are recruited into gangs to complete criminal activities such as smuggling drugs across the border. 

Another thing we learned was the downside to the NHS (national health service) in the United Kingdom. They do not have to “pay” for their healthcare because the money is actually taken out on their taxes. Therefore things such as cancer treatment are already covered. However, wait lists are severely long and can be around two years of a waiting period. Only the wealthy can really receive quick “gold-star” care due to the fact that they pay extra money to get seen first. As a result of this, it has been proven that many people who are from poorer backgrounds and locations are not as healthy as those who are well off. They struggle to receive quality care and become unhealthy over time. They called this free but not equal. 

Our next lecture was on diversity and mental health nursing in Birmingham. Our speakers began the lecture by mentioning the broad diversity in Birmingham. Their main goal was to explain the relevance between past and present aspects of Birmingham and how they relate to mental health. They explained that the East India Company was formed in 1600 in a coffee shop in London. They were a trading company and their main component of trade was opium. The company started to move towards India and became exteremely successful during the early 1800s when they began to collect taxes in Bengal (the richest part of India). India was actually the richest country in the world at this time. The EIC had an army of around 200,000 men which was actually twice the size of the British army at the time. They used this army to take over India, and they forced farmers to grow Indigo and Opium. They also  tried to get to China through the Himalayas and eventually went to war with Nepal. The plan was to be able to gain silk, spices, etc from China. However, China was charging silver which the EIC did not have. Therefore, Opium comes into the story as they started to deal the drug on the streets of China. Thus, the first Opium war started. Famine set in and three-hundred million people died due to the growing of food being put on hold for Opium and Indigo production. Queen Victoria became “Empress of India” less than 20 years later around 1858. Indian independence was eventually gained back in 1947 which led to the largest human migration in history. In 1997 to the present, Hon Kong upholds a culture of repression as they are only allowed to teach certain things in school- very few know they were ruled by England for a while. In 2020, passports opened up from Hong Kong to the UK. As a result of this, 30-50,000 Hong Kongers have come to live in Birmingham in the past 3 years. You may have been wondering the relevance of this history to my blog. I was wondering the same thing when I was sitting in the lecture. Well here is how it is relevant to today’s mental health. The body is changed by our experiences and circumstances such as the history of your genetic line. These mental health issues can be passed on and intergenerational trauma exists. Therefore, mental health nurses need to become experts on bodies, mechanisms, neurology, chemistry, societies, relationships, history, etc. This was one example of how knowing history may help nurses understand drugs that are harmful today and how mental health canbe predetermined based of off many different factors. 

Our last presentation was very interesting because we had a nurse of Carribean  heritage who was alive during the 1950s come and talk about her personal experience being a part of nursing history. She told us many stories about how she advance and persevered throughout her lifetime to become a great nurse. Her colleuge gave us a presentation on the industries in Birmingham that were established as a result of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Our dinner was very good. We went to a Caribbean restaurant!

Thanks for tuning in! Talk to you all tomorrow!