Forward

It is an honour to have been invited to contribute this foreword to the proceedings of the Festschrift held in honour of Annie Altschul – and in which she participated – shortly before her death in December 2001.

While I never had the privilege of meeting Professor Altschul, I am well aware of her outstanding body of work and her distinguished position in mental health nursing both worldwide and in the UK. I can certainly relate to her focus on mental health nursing, as it is such an important foundation of my own nursing career and practice.

Despite having officially retired many years ago, Annie Altschul has remained an important personality in nursing in the United Kingdom and indeed internationally. Not only for her distinguished career, but for the profoundly important impact she has had on patient care and on nursing, and for her warmth of personality.

Undoubtedly her own life experiences contributed to her nursing perspective, for example her flight, as a young Jewish woman, from the Nazi threat to refuge then permanent residence in the United Kingdom. It surely contributed to her delicate cultural sensitivity when she spent a year in the USA in the early 1960s looking at mental health nursing.

As a nurse from the US, I am proud that she found many positives in our attitudes to patient care and nursing education in those distant days. That she also found US nurses to be so candid about the challenges and problems surely reflects the mature and non-judgemental way in which she engaged with them.

Annie Altschul’s work will continue to have a positive impact on the quality of care in mental health nursing for a long time to come. She accumulated many honours during her lifetime for her influential work in education and research, yet she never lost sight of the central importance of the therapeutic relationship between patient and nurse, something which she shared with Hildegard Peplau whom I am privileged to call my mentor.

I understand that Annie wore her many academic and public honours, including her RCN Fellowship, very lightly. I agree that the focus should always be on the achievement that has merited the honour, rather than the honour itself. But I also believe that the honours Annie received say some important things about the way in which our society and the nursing profession have come to perceive mental health.

We know that one in four people will be affected by mental ill health at some time in their life. This stark statistic proves that we simply cannot afford to continue to stigmatise people suffering in this way, or to marginalise those who care for them. Public honours like those that Annie Altschul received have helped bring mental health issues into the mainstream.

As a profession, nursing deserves to be judged by its treatment of newcomers – but also by the way it supports and celebrates individuals who have made a significant contribution to nursing. I believe that we are getting it right with Annie Altschul. We have used and celebrated her contributions during her lifetime and we are taking them forward with us into the future through endeavours such as this publication. I commend it to you.

Beverly Malone
General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.