Dr. Phil Cooper MBE, Nurse Consultant Mental Health and Substance Misuse

Anything is possible in the NHS

I experienced the grief of losing a fiancé to cancer when I was aged 20. I had a desire to understand for myself and to help people deal with the experiences I had felt, and these have undoubtedly influenced my journey in mental health nursing. I went to university and worked as a transport supervisor. My sister was a mental health nurse and I investigated training as a mental health nurse; the desire to help others had stayed with me. I trained in January 1990 in Warrington and although daunted by my first placement on an acute mental health ward, I found myself fascinated by the people I worked alongside and loved every minute of my time in all areas of mental health nursing.

Dr. Phil Cooper MBE

Nurse Consultant Mental Health and Substance Misuse

After qualifying as a registered mental health nurse, I worked at a local community substance misuse service. The learning curve in substance use and approaches to manage and facilitate natural change behaviour was steep but listening to people and what they thought helped them certainly helped me learn quickly. I observed that many people who used substances had high levels of mental health distress and lifetime trauma, and this led to a career passion advocating and supporting people with both mental health and substance misuse issues.

Mental health nursing provides a great opportunity to learn about so many things it started a desire for further study in community mental health nursing, completing a master’s degree in mental health and a professional doctorate in nursing. Study provided me with an endless fascination with finding the best ways to help and support people recover from mental health and substance misuse issues. I like to see the funny side of most situations and mental health nursing provides the opportunity to help others using the therapeutic relationship and appropriate humour. The people I work with and alongside have provided great inspirational moments that have spurred me on in my career. Witnessing people at their lowest points and seeing them move towards amazing turnarounds in their life has led me to believe that anything is possible in the NHS. Mental health nursing colleagues are endlessly inspiring, and I am always learning from others who use and deliver services.

Devising training programmes in mental health and substance misuse and applying learning in practice on the frontline have been crucial as part of my nurse consultant role. I have always been able to remain clinically active and supportive across all mental health teams. I have done this by completing research about the prevalence of substance misuse in mental health assessments, devising intoxication testing procedures to improve service user safety, and shaping Trust responses to a complex area of practice where people may have increased risks of self-harm and suicide. I have personal experience of losing a lifelong friend who took his own life.

These combined life experiences, career path and my love for sport, primarily rugby league, led me to explore another path to help prevent suicide and the devastation caused for those around someone who has taken their own life. A former Great Britain rugby league player took his own life in 2010; I read an article in a rugby league newspaper suggesting the NHS and the sport of rugby league should get together to prevent future tragedies taking place and there was a letter in the newspaper from another mental health nurse (Malcolm Rae, OBE) that took the same viewpoint. A meeting of mental health nurses led to the co-founding of State of Mind Sport charity in 2011. The goal was to improve the mental fitness, wellbeing and working lives of rugby league players and their fans and communities. Mental fitness sessions in sports clubs, schools, colleges, universities, and businesses have reached over 70,000 people since 2011.

As a mental health nurse, you sometimes have one opportunity to make a massive difference in assessing, delivering interventions in collaboration with people who use services, and delivering training for people. I delivered a mental health world record for the world’s largest mental health awareness lesson in June 2018 in a sports stadium. I would never have imagined that this would be possible, but in the NHS as a mental health nurse, anything is possible!!

Being a mental health nurse during and after a global pandemic has been difficult. Mental health nurses will see a big rise in mental health referrals to services. The looming economic consequences of the pandemic will have big impacts on the mental health of the population. The ability to innovate and advance the way in which we deliver messages to prevent as well as manage mental fitness issues will be crucial for society.

Supporting and guiding the next generation of mental health nurses and encouraging innovation is vital to continually challenge and break down barriers to care, such as using technology to deliver interventions to people who have been deemed ‘difficult to engage’. I don’t think anyone is difficult to engage - we need to think creatively how to engage different people and listening is one of the core skills of any mental health professional to improve care alongside people who use services.

For me choosing areas that I felt passionately about helped to develop my practice in my career. I managed to combine my love of sport, mental health, and substance misuse to deliver training to my sporting heroes (getting signing sheets that have the autographs of all those heroes). Seek support from key leaders and decision makers presenting my ideas to them and asking for their support and feedback. In the current economic climate, it may be more important than ever to seek out different sources of funding to improve health and wellbeing and being able to evaluate everything you do can further help fund many innovative projects.