Eileen Skellern

Eileen Skellern FRCN (1923–1980) was an English psychiatric nurse who was involved in pioneering psychosocial and psychotherapeutic methods for treating patients. She helped open up new roles for nurses in mental health work, and demonstrated that they could be equal partners in a team, taking personal responsibility for patient care while collaborating with doctors and playing an important part in new developments in therapeutic treatment. While also taking a lead in education, administration and policy development, she did research and published in medical and nursing journals, and was a member of key committees in her field.

Early life and education

Flora Eileen Skellern was born on 14 June 1923 in Stone, Staffordshire to Flora (née Poole) and Willis Arthur Skellern, a commercial traveller. After attending Retford High School for Girls in Nottinghamshire she went to train as a nurse at Leeds General Infirmary, qualified in 1944, and worked there, first as a staff nurse, then in 1946 as a sister on a ward where there were some psychiatric patients.

The Cassel and Belmont hospitals

Her introduction to nursing psychiatric patients in Leeds made her interested in modern psychological approaches to care of the mentally unwell.

In 1952–53 she wrote a report for the Royal College of Nursing, The Role of the Ward Sister. It was based on numerous visits to hospitals and was funded by a scholarship grant given for a study of the “practical application to ward administration of modern methods in the instruction and handling of staff and student nurses”. It was "the first serious piece of nursing research done in England by a psychiatric nurse". They proceeded as equals in forming conclusions about their therapies and treatments. Both published articles about their work, and Skellern's papers have been described as giving a "definitive picture of the new developments in psychiatric nursing in the 1950s". While she was in charge she collaborated with a team of anthropologists and social scientists who were studying the Unit.

Later career

From 1957 to 1959 she studied at the Royal College of Nursing to qualify as a registered nurse teacher (RNT) and worked as sister tutor for the next two years at St Bartholomew's Hospital. She went to Cheadle Royal Hospital in Cheshire to qualify as a registered mental nurse (RMN). From then on Skellern was always based in the London area and moved to the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley in 1963 to be Superintendent of Nursing, a post to which she had been appointed before her studies in Cheshire. Here she helped establish a therapeutic community unit; and was innovative in developing curricula for psychiatric nurse education using group methods. The students' clinical experience was central to their training and was explicitly linked to their classroom work. This approach was in tune with that of Elliott Jaques, professor of social sciences at Brunel University, whose students went on industrial placements as part of their course. Jacques and Skellern collaborated on the first course ever to combine nursing with social sciences, and developed a joint nursing certificate and degree course which, from 1968, was offered half at the Maudsley and half at Brunel. She was awarded an OBE in 1972, the year the resulting report was published.

In the 1970s she developed cancer but continued to work as much as she could until taking early retirement in 1980, not long before she died on 29 July 1980. In September 1980 the first International Psychiatric Nursing Congress was held, an event which she had been planning for two years. Two days before she died she learned that she had been made a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing. An Eileen Skellern Memorial Lecture series in her honour began in 1982. Among the speakers in the 1980s were Annie Altschul and Caroline Cox. From 2006 the lecture has been the occasion for the presentation of a Lifetime Achievement Award, with recipients including Jo Brand, Helen Bamber, Shirley Smoyak and Malcolm Rae. She has also been recognised by having a new building at the Maudsley named after her: the only nurse to have been remembered in this way.