UCC SONM 25 Year Book

UCC / School of Nursing and Midwifery

had trained 37 of its order who were psychiatric nurses between 1943-51 under the RMPA’s English post-registration examination for Registered Nurses in Mental Deficiency (Sweeney, 2010; 2011). With the establishment of the Department of Health (DoH) in 1947, the new nursing regulatory body, An Bord Altranais (ABA) established a specialist committee to develop a division for ‘mental handicap nurses’ training. By 1958, a syllabus of training had been approved and Rules developed to commence training in 1959. From 1962, this became a three-year programme with the first two years in common with the RGN course, using an adapted practical training booklet. By 1960, though, with 3,200 children, young men and women in residential centres managed by religious orders, falling numbers of vocations to religious life and growing capital expenditure and fees (DoH, 1960), Minister MacEntee, appointed a Commission of Inquiry into Mental Handicap in 1961. The Commission’s Report made recommendations covering all aspects of intellectual disability provision in Ireland and was a significant milestone in the development of the services (Robins, 1992). The National Association for the Mentally Handicapped of Ireland (NAMHI, 1962) influenced the need for the orientation of staff towards teaching and training from a medical model to a more social model of care and the Commission’ recommendations influenced the Nursing Board to place greater focus on social and emotional development in its RNMH syllabus (DoH, 1965).

Graduates 2012

COPE Graduates 2016

For the next two decades, the Board initiated reforms to the syllabus, theory and practice placement requirements and under pressure from employers, began to shift the focus away from bedside nursing and psychiatric paradigms towards educational, vocational and ‘normalisation’ approaches to disability (Wolfensberger, 1972). However, tensions remained in Ireland and in the UK as to whether this form of care belonged outside the discipline of nursing as social care or education and training throughout the past 40 years (Sweeney and Mitchell, 2009). Nevertheless, the Report of the Commission on Nursing affirmed the ‘need to promote the distinct identity and unique working environment of intellectual disability nursing’ (Government of Ireland, 1998, p. 172). This stance was reflected in the nursing board’s retention of the five points of entry to the nursing profession in 2005 (ABA, 2005) and current nurse education standards (NMBI, 2016).

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