This research starts with the fundamental racial realist contention that racism exists, and that it exists in the structures of our social institutions. Growing bodies of evidence attest to workers’ and patients’ experiences of racism at the hands of our healthcare system. Mental health, as a distinct field of practice and education, is no exception. The material effects of racism within the system are unequivocal. What is lacking, however, is an understanding of how nurse education challenges, contributes to, or reinforces the racism that manifests in the healthcare system, through the knowledge and values it (re)produces.
Responding to this gap, my research examines how race and racism are conceptualised and understood in pre-registration mental health nurse education (MHNE) in Scotland. The extent to which this education, as a structure and discourse, understands the problem of racism determines whether and how it can effectively address the problem, and prepare future mental health nurses who have the capacity to be(come) anti-racist.
The aim of the study is to examine MHNE as a structure and this is reflected in the study design. The study samples from multiple institutions and engages with multiple constitutive stakeholders – those who deliver MHNE (the educators); those who receive MHNE (the students); and MHNE’s key agenda documents (the standards and curricula). The emphasis is not on individual insights, but on what these accounts, collectively, tell us about how MHNE positions and understands questions of race and racism.
Critical inquiry into the discourse of MHNE is done with a view not only to knowledge production, but towards disruption and change. By establishing where we are, it lays the foundation for considering how mental health nursing pedagogy might develop differently, such that it could prepare critically-conscious nurses, cognisant of the complexities of racism that manifest in society and in their healthcare system.
