St Patrick’s Mental Health Services (SPMHS) is delighted to launch a new podcast series, Mental Health Conversations, to coincide with World Mental Health Day 2024.
The podcast focuses on mental health nursing, with the first episode of the brand new series available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Exploring mental health nursing
Being a psychiatric nurse is a privilege. Everyone has the right to live a mentally healthy life and feel empowered to achieve whatever they’re capable of. And when someone needs a little help to get to that point, nurses are there to help.
In this series, we will bring you inside the doors of SPMHS, meeting nurses from across our services, and some of the people who have spent time in their care.
Together, we shed light on what it really means to be a mental health nurse today – the rewards and challenges of the role, the deep impact that nurses can make, and where psychiatric nursing is going in the future.
Whether you're a seasoned nurse, a nursing student, or a mental health advocate, Mental Health Conversations brings us together to be informed, inspired and empowered.
Made for nurses, by nurses
Mental Health Conversations is hosted by Shane Kirwan and Aoife Farrington, who both work in our Nursing Department and have extensive experience as psychiatric nurses.
The series is made by nurses, for nurses, and was inspired by one of our staff nurses, Evelina Dudenaite, winner of the Caroline Doyle Nurse Innovation Idea of the Year Award.
The Caroline Doyle Nurse Innovation Idea of the Year Award was launched in 2023 in honour of our former colleague Caroline Doyle, who sadly passed away in 2023. Caroline worked with us in SPMHS for almost 43 years. In recent times, she worked as a Clinical Placement Coordinator in our Nurse Education Centre. She loved working with our student nurses and staff, and she had many close friendships within the hospital. Her wealth of knowledge and clinical experience was widely respected and appreciated by the student nurses and her colleagues.
Evelina’s idea was for SPMHS to launch its very own podcast series, designed to bring listeners inside the doors of our hospitals and services, and to introduce some of the team of colleagues who make SPMHS what it is. And so, that’s what we did.
Sharing nursing and service user perspectives
Each episode features insightful interviews with nursing staff and leaders, researchers, and passionate clinicians who are redefining what it means to be a mental health nurse in today's ever-evolving healthcare landscape.
We hear from some of our former service users on their experience of care and the impact that nurses made in their mental health journeys and recovery.
We look at nursing innovations such as virtual reality, mental health nursing research, digital health, and challenges in mental health nursing. We also look ahead to the future for psychiatric nursing and how nurses can develop their careers to best position themselves for the healthcare sector of the future.
Through Mental Health Conversations, we challenge the status quo, celebrate innovation, and empower each other to make a lasting impact in the lives of people experiencing mental health difficulties.
Listen to episode one now
The first episode of our mental health nursing podcast series is available now on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
It explores a day in the life of a mental health nurse, looking at the kinds of work psychiatric nurses do and the care they provide, the rewards and challenges that can come up on a daily basis, and how service users feel about the support and interaction they have with nurses during their recovery.
Hear the full series
More episodes of Mental Health Conversations will be shared in the coming weeks. Make sure to follow the series on your podcasting platform so that you don’t miss an episode, or get all the episodes, show notes, and more here.
