ABSTRACT
Within the UK, community mental health nurses (CMHNs) are Registered Nurses (Mental Health) who specialize in the assessment, treatment, care and support of people of all ages with mental health conditions (and their families) who are living at home (Hannigan and Coffey, 2003). CMHNs usually operate from a primary or secondary care base and they form an integral part of a multi-disciplinary community mental health team (CMHT). As a profession, CMHNs have a relatively long history within the National Health Service (NHS), one that stretches back to the late 1950s/early 1960s when psychiatric nursing began to view a life outside of the asylums and question the moral imperative of institutional provision for the ‘mentally ill’ (Simmons and Brooker, 1986; White, 1999a; Nolan, 2003). One specialist area of CMHN practice is in working with people with dementia and their families (for illustrations, see Keady et al., 2003 ; also Keady et al., 2007) and it is this focus that forms the substance of this chapter.
