05/8/15

Welcome Visiting Scholar: Dr. Kate Prebble

The Consortium welcomes Dr. Kate Prebble as our newest visiting scholar, arriving in June, 2015.

Dr. Prebble joins us from the University of Auckland, where she is a Nurse Historian and Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing. She writes: “I have had a long career in mental health nursing as a clinician, academic, and professional leader. My primary research interest is in the social history of mental health nursing. My recent historical projects include topics such as the role of District Inspector in New Zealand, mental health nursing in the Waikato, and post-WWII immigration of psychiatric nurses. I have completed oral history collections in nursing and forensic history.”

While visiting, Dr. Prebble will provide a guest lecture on her work in the history of forensic psychiatric nursing in New Zealand in the context of deinstitutionalization. The lecture is co-sponsored by The Critical Research in Health and Healthcare Inequities Unit at the UBC School of Nursing. You can view the Event Poster Here.

For more of Dr. Prebble’s recent research, see her article in the Journal of Law and Medicine (December 2014), entitled: New Zealand’s mental health district inspector in historical context: ‘The impartial scrutiny of a citizen of standing.’

For more information, please email us at nursinghistory@nursing.ubc.ca

05/8/15

Health History Lecture: “We can do this but we need to do it our way”: Oral History Accounts of Deinstitutionalization in New Zealand

Please join the Consortium for Nursing History Inquiry for the next lecture in our Health History Lecture Series. With co-sponser The UBC School of Nursing Critical Research in Health and Healthcare Inequities Unit, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Kate Prebble as our next speaker and visiting scholar. On June 3, 2015, she will present her work entitled: “‘We can do this but we need to do it our way’: Oral history accounts of setting up a forensic psychiatric service in Auckland, New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s – Creating an institution in the context of deinstitutionalisation?”

Abstract: This presentation explores the development of forensic psychiatric services in Auckland, New Zealand in the late 1980s and 1990s. The story is based on oral histories undertaken with twenty-one participants who helped create the service. They told of an innovative service, shaped by driven, motivated people, following some inspiring leadership. The background for this innovation and change was the chaos and struggles of the mental health hospital Oakley/Carrington, wider political wrangles over whether responsibility for forensic patients lay with the Departments of Justice or Health, and the driving philosophy and policy of deinstitutionalisation. The forensic service that these contributors created was predicated on a distancing from the past chaos, and looking forward to creating a service that was new, different and with home-grown solutions.

Participants were aware of contradictions inherent in providing contained care in the context of deinstitutionalisation. This paper explores how they rationalised their decisions – ‘we have to face the reality that there will always be an institution for people who have criminal offending attached to their mental illness’ – and how they attempted to incorporate principles of liberal psychiatry within the risk-conscious parameters of forensic psychiatric services.

Dr. Kate Prebble and Dr. Claire Gooder

Watch the Webcast

For more information email us at: nursinghistory@nursing.ubc.ca