Our work

Protect, Preserve, Share and Cherish

The History of Nursing Forum is open to RCN members who want to learn more about their history and to promote awareness within the profession. We believe the history of nursing is wider than the study of nurse training and practise; it encompasses the experiences of individuals and groups, movements and organisations, religion and war, culture and gender, politics and social ideas.

Read our annual plans in our 2024 Charter.

Read our Forum 2024 annual strategy day meeting notes.

You can see our current and past exhibitions online.

These include:

• Pandemic!
• Nursing 100 years of infection and
• Apects of Age.

We have exciting plans for our forthcoming exhibition due to be launched in 2022 which will be on Learning Disability Nursing.

We also hold events and workshops both online and around the UK. 

We are delighted to share our Guide: Tracing Nurses - A guide to British nursing sources for researching family and local history.

With the release in January 2022 of the 1921 Census we wanted to share a guide on how to search for nurses. As the largest profession in the UK there is an increasing amount of information being made available in archives and online. This self-service guide aims to give you practical instructions and background information to help you get started. Read our blog to find out more.

If you have comments on the guide, please feedback through honf@rcn.org.uk (please be aware we do not undertake family history research).

In 2020 as part of the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife celebrations we launched a partnership project with the British Library to ensure UK nursing websites and twitter accounts are permanently preserved.

To find out about the project and how the project progressed in 2021 read our blog post.

New for 2022

Watch this space as we scope plans to increase the number and quality of Wikipedia articles on the history of nursing in the UK.