St George's, University of London
Department Member, Centre for medical and healthcare education
PBL Tutor Lead
Thesis Title: Dual Diagnosis: A Challenge for Acute Mental Health Nursing
About
My professional background is in adult, obstetric, intensive care, and mental health nursing. Having spent some time as a senior staff nurse working in general and vascular surgery and medicine I went on to qualify as a mental health nurse at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital. After several years experience in the mental health field, I specialised in the substance misuse area, first in the alcohol treatment field, and managed the inpatient Maudsley Alcohol Unit for some time. Later I specialised in the the drug field, working at the DDU (drug dependency unit) at St George's Hospital in the early 1990's while simultaneously running a drug and alcohol out-patient follow-up clinic and providing a drug and alcohol liaison service for the wards at St George's including A&E and Springfield mental health unit.
Prior to specilaising I gained experience working at what is now the Cawley Centre (treatment service for people with Personality Disorder and related issues), the Adolescent Unit at the Bethlem and the Child Mental Health service at the Maudsley, the Mother and Baby Unit at the Bethlem, the Eating Disorder Unit, and at the Felix Post Unit (a service for older people with mental health problems).
Subsequently I gained valuable experience in the mental health research field at St. Georges’ Medical School in SW London within the Department of Addictive Behaviour and then at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London where I was one of two researchers conducting the The Maudsley Long-term Follow-up of Child and Adolescent Depression in the Child and Adolescent academic department, which at that time was led by Professor Michael Rutter. The two following papers are the main (original) reports of this study:
Part 1:
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/179/3/210
Part 2 :
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/179/3/218
I completed a PhD in 2004 at Christ Church College Canterbury – the title of my thesis: Dual Diagnosis: a Challenge for Acute Mental Health Nursing which was based on my work at Oxleas NHS Trust within the acute mental unit in Greenwich.
While working as a Senior Lecturer at The University of Greenwich I had responsibility for designing and delivering the substance misuse and dual diagnosis curricula throughout a range of pre-qualifying and post-qualifying programmes, from diploma to master's level as well as providing research and project supervison to nursing, social work and students from other disciplines. I established several innovative practice assessed courses relating to dual diagnosis, physical wellbeing in mental health, amongst others.
I am a founding member of Mental Health Nurses Academic UK (MHNACUK )which was formed in 2003. http://mhnauk.swan.ac.uk. I have experience of being part of the editorial board for substance misuse journals, for example The Journal of Substance Misuse which was launched in 1996. Last year I was invited to become a consulting editor for The Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem Based Learning http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/ijpbl/
Since September 2008 I have been the Problem Based Learning (PBL) Tutor Lead for the fast track (MBBS4) medical degree at St George’s Medical School SW London. Recently I became part of an innovative elearning project team concerned with developing an electronic PBL delivery format for both MBBS4 and MBBS5.http://www.elu.sgul.ac.uk/g4/project-team/
As well as having a full-time academic post at St George's, I am studying for part-time for an E-learning Teaching and Training qualification at the University of Greenwich http://gre-guns2.gre.ac.uk/PCET/PROGRAMMES/CelTT/CeLTTAdmin.nsf. This is an interesting course, run on a part-time, predominantly on-line basis.
email me at: olivemckeown@googlemail.com
