The Mental Hospital and Institutional Workers' Union was a trade union in the United Kingdom.
The union was established as the National Asylum Workers' Union in 1910 by asylum attendants in Lancashire. George Gibson became its General Secretary in 1912, and served in post for the remainder of the union's existence.
In 1916, the union lost its membership in Southern Ireland to the Irish Mental Hospital Workers' Union. In 1931, it changed its name to the "Mental Hospital and Institutional Workers Union".
In 1946, the union merged with the Hospital and Welfare Services Union to form the Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE). By this stage, it had secured a very high membership amongst mental hospital staff, including the vast majority of mental hospital nurses
Famous quotes containing the words mental, hospital and/or union:
“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”
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“Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.”
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“If the Union is once severed, the line of separation will grow wider and wider, and the controversies which are now debated and settled in the halls of legislation will then be tried in fields of battle and determined by the sword.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)