Our Library team help honour our past with a set of recordings about children’s nursing
The Association of British Paediatric Nurses (ABPN), the oldest children’s nursing association in the world and our Library team at BWC has produced a set of oral recordings of the experiences of children’s nurses, relating to their education and careers.
The project is part of the ABPN Oral History Project ‘Honouring Our Past, Seeing Our Future’ and is also part of their 85th Anniversary celebrations.
A grant was received from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to support the work which asked participants to talk about their career in children’s nursing from the time of their training.
Ann Daly, our Trust Library Manager said: “I was delighted to be approached to support this project as I was aware of the value in capturing the personal experiences of paediatric nurses as this type of tacit knowledge is often lost or goes unshared.”
Recordings began in 2023 and continued until the summer of 2024. A total of 103 recordings were collected, representing over 3,750 years of nursing, from all four countries of the UK with participants undertaking a range of different training and education leading to registration as children’s nurses with the regulatory bodies - the General Nursing Council, the UK Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting and now the Nursing and Midwifery Council.
The training periods reflect training from the 1950s through to the 2020s capturing interesting and important historical information that would be unavailable if it wasn’t for this amazing project.
Ann liaised with the hospital archive at Archives and Collections in the Library of Birmingham to ensure the terms of access, copyright and storage were clear to ABPN, BWC and those nurses who had provided recordings. This involved advising on Recording Agreements, Participants Agreements (assigning copyright to the project) and completing Deposit and Receipt Agreements.
Ann said: “As a Librarian, I recognise the historical value of tacit knowledge such as this. It also seemed appropriate for the recordings to be held in BWC archives as the first ever registered children’s nurse in the UK was a Birmingham nurse.
“The project has enabled both the sharing and storing of this knowledge and therefore researchers, educators, learners and the general public can now access, learn and enjoy them.”