Community Nursing Care at Home: Gold Award Winner Anthony Baines ARPS
Congratulations to Dr Anthony Baines, Reader in the School of Biosciences. Anthony has been turning his attention in between lecturing, researching, writing, marking exams scripts and academic tutor duties, to his passion of photography…with exceptional results! In early January 2016, Anthony saw an ad in the Royal Photographic Society Journal announcing a competition to celebrate the centenary of the Royal College of Nursing. To mark this milestone in RCN’s history they joined with the RPS and NHS Employers to look for the best photographs that illustrate UK nursing in all its diversity. Professional and amateur photographers were invited to submit pictures for a competition, run with the RPS, to select the images for an exhibition which will tour the country.
Anthony had a clear personal brief of what he wanted to achieve even before starting to take the pictures. He said “I wanted to get pictures that represented some of the key concepts in modern community nursing: the ageing population; care that keeps elderly people independent and able to live in their own home with an enhanced quality of life; that nursing care is provided by both men and women; and most of all, I wanted to show the nature of the caring interaction between nurse and patient. This seemed to me to meet the overall brief of the competition, which was to record UK nursing in all its diversity”.
Anthony was able to arrange access to nurses and their patients through the kind help of the Kent Community Health Foundation NHS Trust (KCHFT). He had sessions documenting two aspects of the KCHFT nurses at work: one at the with the Wound Medicine Centre team (nurses Tina Burton and Chris Sharp) based at the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital in Herne Bay; the other with Lucian Smith, a community nurse, on his rounds visiting patients at home in Canterbury. Time spent with each was inspiring in seeing both the dedication of the nurses and their caring interaction with the patients. Of course, photographing patients and nurses for public display requires paperwork – everyone identifiable in the pictures had to sign release forms saying they were happy with this.
As a result of being ‘in the thick of it’ Anthony was able to get a set of pictures that represented a true fly-on-the-wall record of what they do. He submitted pictures to the competition from both the Wound Medicine Centre, and the round with Lucian Smith.
The competition attracted over 800 entries – and Anthony was surprised and delighted to be chosen as the winner of the Gold Award. His picture “Community Care at Home” shows nurse Lucian Smith providing nursing care to an elderly patient. The competition was judged by a panel of nurses, photographers and celebrities that included the BBC journalist Huw Edwards.
You can see details of the competition and exhibition at: https://www.rcn100photo.org.uk/events/royal-college-nursing-100/winners/