Short Lists and Panel 2026
Shortlists and Lecture synopses for the 2026 Skellern Lecture
Dr Nicola Clibbens Associate Professor Mental Health Nursing PhD, MA(Ed), Dip. Soc. Sci, RN(Mental Health), NMC recorded teacher & practice educator
Creating relational safety in emergency mental health contexts: how mental health nurses overcome systemic and interpersonal challenges.
Emergency mental health services are delivered in a diverse multi-agency and multi-professional community-based contexts. Mental health nurses constitute the largest part of the workforce across this landscape in the UK, including in NHS crisis services, emergency departments and in collaborative roles with ambulance, police and voluntary sector services. Finite resources and growing population mental health need in the UK have led services to improve accessibility and cost effectiveness through several initiatives including increased use of telehealth and time-limited calls or visits. People experiencing a mental health crisis ask for kindness, compassion and relationships built on trust and continuity; described collectively as relational safety. In reality, contact with emergency mental health services is likely to include time-limited interactions with professionals requiring rapid development of trust; essentially between strangers who may never meet again. Continuity of care, if conceptualised as having the same worker throughout, is difficult to provide in emergency contexts. Continuity may however be conceptualised differently, including through interagency collaboration and involving family and friends. The use of telehealth may improve accessibility, but a lack of visual cues may impede therapeutic engagement and decision making, especially where safety is a concern. Responding to mental health emergencies can be distressing for staff who may struggle to retain their compassion if they lack access to appropriate support that is tailored to the emergency context- they too need to experience compassion to deliver the relational safety people accessing services expect. This lecture will explore relational safety in the context of mental health emergencies using findings from my own research and that of others. Barriers and enablers to relational safety, at systemic and interpersonal levels, will be set out emphasising the central role of mental health nurses in championing the relational aspects of emergency mental health interventions.
Dr Emma Wadey, PhD, RN (MH). Chief Nursing Officer, Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust.
From Surviving to Thriving – caring for the Carers.
The COVID 19 pandemic and its negative impact on mental health in the global workforce, was an impetus for the development of several new nurse well-being initiatives, specifically the design and implementation of the Professional Nurse Advocate role and a programme of work to prevent nurse suicide. I recognised a significant gap in knowledge and action to address nurse wellbeing, and nurse professional development. UK data on suicide by occupation shows that female nurses have the highest rate of suicide of any female profession. I built on my previous knowledge and research of post traumatic growth after suicide to develop a business case, to develop and implement the Professional Nurse Advocate Program (PNA) and lead a national programme to prevent nurse suicide. I led the publication of suicide prevention and postvention toolkits for healthcare staff by NHS England commissioned a healthcare suicide database. The PNA programme, taught at master’s degree level, is a postgraduate, professional leadership program for nurses. It is designed to support psychological health and well-being, increase nurse retention, and improve the quality of patient experiences. On completion of the program, nurses facilitate restorative clinical supervision (RCS), offer career coaching and lead quality improvement projects. Restorative clinical supervision addresses the emotional needs of staff, research has reported it reduces stress and burnout in staff. In the first 3 years of its implementation over 11,000 PNA training places were funded for nurses working across England and in the military, in all areas of clinical practice including hospital, community, primary care, and criminal justice settings. Since data collection began in April 2022 to June 2024 the PNAs have delivered over 48,000 sessions of Restorative Clinical Supervision to nursing colleagues, facilitated over 30,000 career conversations with nurses in practice and have led over 2,200 quality improvement programmes to improve patient care each month. Independent evaluation by the University of Coventry demonstrates that the PNA role has increased nursing morale, decreased burnout, improved job satisfaction, and led to reductions in nurse turnover.
Dr Dan Warrender, PhD, MSc, MA, PGCertLTA, BN(MH), FHEA. Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing,
Department of Health, Sport and Wellbeing, Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences, Abertay University, Scotland.
Burning bridges and the potential of ashes: a regeneration for the verb of ‘mental health nursing’.
It feels like MH nursing is standing still, if not slipping backwards. Our profession is marketed to prospective students as art and science, rooted in human relationships, yet we continue to witness examples of poor care, with poor relationships, and sometimes more harm than help. Compassion fatigue can arise through the perils of demanding roles where fallible humans reach their limit, however not all poor care can be explained away so easily. Some mental health nurses dampen the enthusiasm of students and graduates, with anti-intellectualism and the theory-practice gap still festering. Furthermore, there is a theory mismatch between university education and the jobs people do. Mental health education is often marginalised, dependent on permission from a nurse orthodoxy, with the NMC’s church of holism demanding everything, without articulating specific challenges unique to MH nursing. Inside university education, administrators often count numbers ignoring quality, with recruitment a financial exercise rather than robust selection process. It is not all doom and gloom, yet good MH nurses, are often so in spite of the systems around them, not because of them. Imagine how much better it could be. Before priding in our role, we must own ourselves, and in doing so, perhaps escape our closest authorities. Two bridges may need burned, those to psychiatry, and perhaps more controversially, to nurse orthodoxy. Whilst MH nursing, when done well, is truly an enaction of the verb ‘nursing’, the noun of what it means to be a ‘nurse’ has been stolen. What it means to be a MH nurse, needs to be explicitly distinguished as distinct in a way that society understands. This lecture will prod at elephants in the room, before recognizing potential and celebrating the possibility of regeneration and greater autonomy for the profession, whatever its future holds.
Dr Daniel Wesemann, DNP, MSW, PMHNP-BC, ARNP, FAANP. Associate Professor (Clinical), Director PMHNP DNP Program, University of Iowa. President of the International Society of Psychiatric Nurses (ISPN), Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN).
Global Voices, Grounded Practice: Teaching the Next Generation of Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurses Through Creativity, Connection, and Psychotherapy.
In an era when psychopharmacology dominates psychiatric treatment, preserving and advancing psychotherapy as a core skill for psychiatric-mental health nurses has become both a professional and moral imperative. My work has centered on rebalancing this equation—ensuring that the next generation of psychiatric-mental health nurses enters practice with the therapeutic competencies essential to holistic mental health care. Tradition reminds us that symptom relief cannot be divorced from meaning, relationship, and the patient’s lived narrative. In my leadership roles in the International Society of Psychiatric Nurses, program director at the University of Iowa College of Nursing and collaborations with nursing organizations worldwide, I have expanded global networks for psychiatric-mental health nurse education, forging partnerships in Japan, UK, Canda and Iceland. These collaborations have allowed for the exchange of culturally informed psychotherapy strategies, promoting accessibility and adaptability across diverse healthcare systems. Recognizing the enduring role of story and symbol in our profession, I developed Peplau’s Ghost, an international podcast dedicated to psychiatric-mental health nursing’s past, present, and future. Through interviews with leaders, historical inquiry, and creative storytelling, the podcast has extended psychiatric-mental health nursing education beyond traditional classrooms, reaching listeners worldwide. These efforts highlight how technology and narrative can democratize knowledge and sustain our professional identity. In the Skellern lecture, I will reflect on lessons learned from teaching, podcasting, and international collaboration, considering how we can resist the seduction of medication-only solutions while embracing integrative, evidence-based care. I will argue that creativity—whether in pedagogy, digital media, or clinical practice—is essential to ensuring psychotherapy thrives in psychiatric-mental health nursing. Ultimately, my vision is to equip future nurses with both the scientific rigor and the humanistic grounding necessary to meet the growing global demand for mental health care, and to remind us all that the therapeutic relationship remains our most powerful tool.
JPMHN Lifetime Achievement Award 2026 Short List
SKELLERN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD BIOGRAPHIES
Dr Elizabeth Collier
Elizabeth has been both fearless and peerless in her clinical and academic excellence, knowledge exchange, applied research for service-user benefit, enablement of others and her professional activism. Her distinguished career spans 36 years in clinical practice, including for 8 years bridging the gap between practice and theory as a lecturer-practitioner, then as a lecturer at the University of Salford and latterly a senior lecturer at the University of Derby. Elizabeth’s career has had impact on the field of mental health nursing, mental health care and education, nationally and internationally. She has always been conscious in her choices to commit her energy, compassion, and intellectual heft to the betterment of services, the care and enablement of patients, students and colleagues, and in demanding and supporting everyone around her to do better, rather than her own career advancement. Always using her positions in the pursuit of stamping out stigma, prejudice and inequality and improving the evidence base and standards of care for all people experiencing mental health need or marginalisation, but especially those in later life. Elizabeth has continuously contributed peer reviewed published works to many aspects of critical debate and scholarship, research, service improvement, practice development and education, advancing our profession again and again, through a body of work which spans more than 27 years, and over 50 international peer reviewed journal papers, editorials, books and chapters, and published research and knowledge exchange reports and monographs, cited over 530 times. In her tenure as a lecture at Salford University, Elizabeth led many elements of preregistration nursing curriculum design and delivery, and used her Lecturer-practitioner post and longstanding clinical networks to drive evidence-based, research-informed clinical practice in her field and practice-informed teaching excellence. Her contribution to education, training and workforce development for the care of those experiencing dementia has international reach. Alongside colleagues within internal higher education partnership she co-designed, developed and implemented the POSaDEM Positive about dementia European life long learning programme. Working with partners from Dublin City University Ireland, Saimaa University of Applied Sciences Finland, Carinthian University of Applied Sciences Austria, Maastricht University Netherlands, Bournemouth University UK. Elizabeth is passionate about and campaigned and researched across her career for the needs of those developing and experiencing functional mental health conditions in later life, innovating important methodological contributions in the field using life course and biographical methods.
Professor Cheryl Forchuk, RN, PhD, O. C, O Ont, FCAHS, FCAN, FRSC.
Dr. Cheryl Forchuk
Distinguished University Professor at the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing (Western University, Canada) with a cross appointment to the Department of Psychiatry, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. She is a Scientist with Lawson Research Institute, the research arm of St. Joseph’s Health Care – London, Ontario, Canada. Her work consistently uses Participatory Action Research approaches to identify problems and then co-develop and test solutions. For over three decades this has included people with lived experience of mental illness as co-investigators who are involved from initial identification of the issue to co-authorship on resulting papers. The research consistently includes frontline service providers and policy decision-makers. This has been foundational to working on highly relevant issues and coming up with solutions that are implemented into practice. As examples, WHO released a policy document on good mental health practices and the Transitional Discharge Model was included; her work on addressing veteran homelessness has been adapted by Veterans Affairs Canada and Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. She has published on many topics including transitional discharge, therapeutic relationships, technology in mental health care, harm reduction, poverty, housing and homelessness. She has published numerous books including on Hildegard Peplau's interpersonal theory of nursing, Therapeutic Relationships to the Transitional Discharge Model, Mental Health, Housing and Homelessness, and Poverty, Mental Health and Social Inclusion. With Dr. A. Rudnick, she published a 6-book series on social science methods in health research. Dr. Forchuk has been honoured with numerous awards including being named an Officer in the Order of Canada, Order of Ontario, honorary life memberships in Registered Nurses Association of Ontario and Canadian Association of Advanced Practice Nursing, a Research Pioneer Award from Psychosocial Rehabilitation Canada, mental health champion award from London Canadian Mental Health Association, and a Fellowship in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the Canadian Academy of Nursing and the Royal Society of Canada
Professor Ben Hannigan
Professor Ben Hannigan is Emeritus Professor of Mental Health Nursing in the School of Healthcare Sciences at Cardiff University. Ben’s nursing education began in East London where he trained in the mental health and adult fields. Having worked in a community mental health team in Tower Hamlets he upped sticks in 1997 to take up a lecturing post in South Wales, in August 2025 becoming Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University. As a researcher, Ben studies mental health systems and services, taking the view that these are exquisitely complex, interconnected and contested. The collaborative programme of research he has led and contributed to in this area has received significant and sustained funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research, with investigations into crisis care for children and young people, end of life care for people with severe mental illnesses, care planning and coordination, and more. With colleagues he has published widely in these, and related, fields in health and social scientific journals, books and chapters. He remains committed to developing research capacity in health and care, supporting 16 postgraduate research students to completion and acting as a mentor and general sounding board to colleagues. He has examined over 30 postgraduate research degrees in the UK and internationally. A longstanding Senior Fellow of Advance HE, Ben has developed and led education programmes and modules at all academic levels. Active in the profession, between 2019-20 he served as elected Chair of Mental Health Nurse Academics UK, having previously served as Vice Chair in 2017-18. He has led and served on conference committees (including for the International Mental Health Nursing Research Conference) and on editorial boards (including for Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, and the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing). Sometime in the next few years, with decent boots and a fair wind he will have completed a walk around the perimeter of Wales which began in 2013.
Hilary McCallion CBE
Hilary McCallion’s career has spanned 50 years, encompassing clinical, educational and leadership roles directly in the NHS and supporting NHS staff and service users. With extensive leadership experience, including:
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Executive Director of Nursing and Education, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
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Non-Executive Director and Senior Independent Director, Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
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Independent Governor and Senior Independent Governor, London South Bank University,
She is currently the Managing Director of Hilary McCallion Consultancy Limited, providing national leadership programmes, executive coaching, and service reviews, including Serious Incident Inquiries and Public Enquiries. In her extensive career, Hilary has contributed significantly to national and local policy improvements, research, and nurse education. She has held Trustee positions with Dementia UK, The Maudsley Charity, and Bethlem Museum Arts and Heritage Trust. Recognised for her contributions to mental health nursing, she was awarded Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2012. She held visiting professorships at Buckinghamshire New University and Nightingale School, Kings College, London and until recently was visiting professor at London South Bank University. As one of the founding members of the Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Director of Nursing and Lead Nurses National forum, she chaired the forum in its early days and was instrumental in its current success and extensive influence. She is a published author, speaker, and mentor, committed to empowering clinical staff, improving patient care, and driving transformational leadership in healthcare. She passionately develops people to achieve their maximum potential and success and drives nurses to recognise their worth and vital contribution within the world of healthcare. Many current or recently retired Chief Nurses in England have been led, supported, developed and coached by Hilary, and her influence has directly shaped the landscape of those who lead mental healthcare in the UK today.
Professor Tony Warne
Professor Tony Warne – Professor in Mental Health Care (Emeritus) at the University of Salford. This September, Tony celebrates 50 years of working in mental health, starting as a student nurse in 1975. He was the commissioning nurse for the first forensic unit for adolescents in the NHS, moving to Manchester in 1984. He was responsible for the North West Regional specialist mental health services hosted at Greater Manchester West Mental Health Trust before moving into academia. Tony became a professor in 2006, and a year later was appointed the first executive Dean for the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work. The focus of Tony’s research interest has been on inter-personal, intra-personal and extra-personal relationships, using a psychodynamic and managerialist analytical discourse. His research centred on exploring the impact of such relationships on nursing practice, policy, organisation and particularly nurse education and the preparation for nursing practice. Tony has published 71 papers in peer-reviewed journals, published 20 research reports, and presented 120 peer-reviewed international conference papers in 25 different countries. With his co-author, Professor Sue McAndrew he also co-edited and authored two books and published 18 chapters in edited books on mental health care. Tony has undertaken a number of editorial board roles, and been a member of several scientific committees, including the international Nursing conference in Slovakia, and the Nordic mental health nursing conference in Finland. Since retiring from the university in 2017, Tony has held several Non Executive Director roles including being Chair at Stockport NHS FT. He was invited to apply for the Chair role at Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS FT (think Panorama) by NHS England, and some 40 years after first working at the Trust, he returned on the 1st January 2024. GMMH is scheduled to come out of special measures this October.
The panel is made up of previous lecturers and award recipients, sponsor representatives, organisers and student representatives. The panel vote using a matrix ranking short listed candidates. The 2026 panel is chaired by Professor Sally Hardy
PANEL 2026
Dr Anne Aiyegbusi (past lecturer), Dr Russell Ashmore (past lecturer), Professor Len Bowers (past lecturer/past recipient), Dr Joy Bray (honorary), Geoff Brennan (past lecturer), Professor Neil Brimblecombe (past lecturer), Professor Phil Burnard (past recipient), Professor Tony Butterworth (past lecturer/past recipient), Professor Patrick Callaghan (past lecturer/past recipient), Professor Mary Chambers (past lecturer/past recipient), Professor Marie Crowe (JPMHN board), Dr John Crowley (University of Greenwich), Professor Bryn Davis (past recipient), Sean Duggan (past recipient), Professor Joy Duxbury (past lecturer), Professor Cheryl Forchuk (past lecturer), Dr Celeste Foster (past lecturer), Catherine Gamble (past lecturer), Dr Julie Hall (Notts Health Care Trust), Dr Ben Hannigan (Past chair MHNA), Professor Sally Hardy (past recipient), Dr Ada Hui (past lecturer), Marion Janner (past recipient), Professor Karina Lovell (past lecturer), Professor Hugh Mckenna (past recipient/JPMHN Editor), Professor Mick Mckeown (past lecturer), Beverley Murphy (SLAM), Professor Fiona Nolan (past chair MHNA), Professor Peter Nolan (past recipient), Professor Ian Norman (past lecturer), Professor Malcolm Rae (past recipient), Dr Julie Repper (past lecturer), Professor Alan Simpson (past lecturer), Professor David Sines (past lecturer), Dr Ben Thomas (past lecturer), Dr Jim Turner (Chair, MHNA), Jane Wells (Director, Oxleas), Professor Gary Winship (past lecturer).
