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:
“The only inequalities that matter begin in the mind. It is not income levels but differences in mental equipment that keep people apart, breed feelings of inferiority.”
—Jacquetta Hawkes (b. 1910)
“The sun his hand uncloses like a statue,
Irrevocably: thereby such light is freed
That all the dingy hospital of snow
Dies back to ditches.”
—Philip Larkin (19221986)
“[Let] the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into paradise.”
—James Madison (17511836)