Nurses' Voices
"An oral history that gives nurses a voice."
Nurses Voices captures the oral history of St George's Hospital in London from the perspective of its nurses. More than 150 interviews and 1,000 hours of recordings have been generated for the project, featuring nurses and midwives who trained or worked at St George’s from around 1930 to the present day.
Memories of historical events are different for each person and by recording personal experiences the project boasts a richness that cannot be gained from static records. How did it feel to work in healthcare at the introduction of the National Health Service? Which clinical practices were undertaken that would cause uproar today? What were the personalities involved like to work with?
The success of the Nurses Voices project has led to invitations to work with other organisations to create similar initiatives.
Our Nurses Voices consultancy team was commissioned to work with the Florence Nightingale Museum to create ‘Hospital Voices’, an oral history archive of the memories and experiences of nurses and patients at London’s Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital from 1930 to the modern day.
The Arts Humanities Research Council recently awarded a £260,000 grant to launch ‘Museum Lives’, an oral history project with staff at London’s Natural History Museum. The grant will allow experts from our Nurses Voices consultancy team in partnership with Kingston University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to undertake a three-year programme of interviews to record the memories and experiences of curators, collectors and other specialists working at the museum, and to produce a detailed historical record and create a host of multimedia resources for the museum’s exhibitions and education work.
For more information visit www.nursesvoices.org.uk
