Community mental health nursing in Alberta, Canada: an oral history

Abstract

Community mental health nurses had a central role in the construction of new rehabilitative practices and community mental health services in the 1960s and 1970s. The purpose of this article is, first, to explore how nurses understood and created their new role and identity in the turbulent context of deinstitutionalization. The development of after care services for patients discharged from Alberta Hospital in Ponoka (AH-Ponoka), a large mental institution in Calgary, in the Canadian province of Alberta, will be used as a case study. I specifically focus on the establishment of outpatient services in a new psychiatric department at Foothills General Hospital in Calgary. Second, I examine how deinstitutionalization itself shaped community mental health nurses' work. Oral history interviews with nurses and other mental health professionals, who had a central role in this transformation process, provide a unique lens through which to explore this social change. The article concludes that new rehabilitative, community-based mental health services can better be understood as a transformation of former institutional practices rather than as a definite break with them.