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INTERVIEW - STEVE JAMIESON
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Phil Greenh
Steve Jamieson is Head of Nursing at the world’s biggest nursing union. With 400,000 members the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), is a powerful lobby as well as an organisation providing policy advice to government. He talks to Phil Greenham about the RCN’s HIV work PL: Tell us about your role Steve. SJ: I am currently the Head of Nursing at the RCN, but prior to coming into the current post I was HIV/sexual health advisor for the RCN. The reason I liked working in that job was that it helped to shape nursing practice and policy around HIV and nursing. Prior to coming to the RCN, I had worked in the big London teaching hospitals like St Thomas’s and King’s as well as Wallasey hospital. But also I commissioned the first HIV brain impairment unit which opened in 1992. At that time we were seeing so many people coming through with neurological problems related to the virus. So I guess through my nursing career I have always been interested in the voice of the patient.
PL: Tell us about the changes you have witnessed over time. SJ: When I first worked in HIV care, HIV was a completely different condition to what it is today. And at that time we were seeing a lot of people who were dying because of the virus and treatments weren’t available. So the whole stigma thing for me was something
‘I remember days when nurses and porters came onto the wards to collect people with HIV, with masks and sticky labels saying, you know, “highly infected people.”’ which we had never really addressed and seen before in young people who were dying of this illness which we knew very little about. And so, it, for me it was about identifying all of the people who were suffering from stigma and taboo attached to the virus but also since the support services were not there for them. From then on in my career has been about making sure that it’s been better for people, addressing the stigma attached to healthcare provision for people with HIV. I remember days when nurses and porters came onto the wards to collect people with HIV, with masks and sticky labels saying, you know, “highly infected people.” Some would never even come to the ward, you know, the injustice that people with the virus had at that time. When I look back and reflect on that now. I think we have come a long way in addressing all of it, and I think nursing has done a lot to help that. But it’s still not right. We still need to do a lot of work with our nurses in general, about having to skill them up to be able to better manage people with HIV. PL: So what’s your role within the RCN in relation to that? SJ: My role within the RCN right now is heading up the professional side of the organisation, The RCN is sort of two fold, it’s a trade union organisation and has a professional side. Right now I have a team of twenty five professional nurse advisors who report in to me. They cover all areas of
Steve Jamieson healthcare from midwifery, children’s rights through to old age, so you’ve got mental health, learning disabilities, sexual health, acute nursing, prison nursing. All those nurse advisors then report into me. So my job is much more about supporting advisors with the pieces of work they are doing around developing good nursing policy and practice for those specific areas. But I have to say I am biased in my whole view around HIV and sexual health. It’s still not being addressed within the Royal College of Nursing in the way I think we should be doing, and I have been public about that. I know Peter Carter our general secretary’s been very public about it, but we still need to do a lot of work with nurses about how they care for manage and support people living with HIV. Because I think if you are a nurse working in learning disabilities or in the mental health areas or children and young people you don’t often see HIV is a problem that you need to be thinking about. For me it’s about making sure all of our nurses have got the basic understanding and the basic knowledge of how to address care and manage to support of people living with HIV. PL: What sort of issues arise in relation to representing nurses who are themselves living with HIV? SJ: It’s quite interesting because, we know there are a lot of nurses out there who are HIV positive and who have got a lot of support from their employers. I guess one of the things that the RCN tries to do and I think