Mercy Browne

Mercy Browne was Oxleas Nurse of the Year in 2010, but as a squeamish young girl she would never have considered nursing for her career.

She is now a Nurse Practitioner with the Assessment and Shared Care team at Ferryview in Woolwich, and won her award for the workshops she established for professionals in the NHS and associated services to improve treatment in perinatal mental health.

Mercy was born in Ghana and came to the UK in 1989. She was brought up by her grandparents as is the tradition there, so that her parents could work.

When she first came to the UK she was the only black person at work but she found “people were so kind that racial tensions never became a problem” and her own eyes were opened to diversity when she helped to care for a gay man for the first time.

“If your attitude is right and you are open-minded it helps”, says Mercy.

Mercy believes her membership and values of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana have helped to develop her caring nature as a nurse. She currently attends the church near Lewisham and belongs to its singing group.

However, she recalls being so squeamish as a girl that she would even run off if she was due to have any inoculations.

Mercy’s nursing expertise is also shaped by the experience of caring for a son, now aged 30, who has schizophrenia. She has also brought up three other children, one daughter, 24, adopted in Sierra Leone, plus two other girls aged 17 and 15. Her son has had no serious episodes of illness in the past three years while taking his medication and is continuing at university studying computing and business. Mercy is very thankful that her managers at Oxleas have shown her compassion when she has had to be away from work when her son was ill.

After leaving school in Ghana Mercy trained as a teacher in home economics. In her twenties she went to Sierra Leone for five years to help set up a school with the charitable Catholic Service and her skills in compassion and understanding were nurtured.

The organisation allowed her to visit the UK on a year’s working holiday and she assisted volunteers in a home for disabled youngsters to enable them to attend college.

In this new role she had no chance to shy away from medical matters and soon found herself helping with injections.

She enjoyed her experiences in England but did not feel she would be able to teach in this country if she moved here with her husband who is in computing. At the care home she came into contact with a Caribbean nursing officer who encouraged her to try nursing and she enrolled on a course.

Mercy is a registered mental nurse (RMN) with a BSc in mental health. She trained in Bexley then moved to Homerton where she worked in a mother and baby unit then as a child nurse for a couple of years before working with Oxleas as a community psychiatric nurse.

Along the way she became involved in a project set up for mothers to bridge the gap between social services and mental health. The mission was to alleviate the fear that children would be taken away if a pregnant woman or mother had serious mental health problems.

The project ceased due to lack of funding but when Mercy became a nurse practitioner she hoped to continue the work. She was inspired by a conference which gave her new ideas. One of these was the series of Understanding Perinatal Mental Health workshops that she holds to educate colleagues in the best ways of looking after a vulnerable mother’s physical and mental health care, aiming to prevent a relapse while she has stopped taking any medication during pregnancy. The workshops are held at least twice a year and one case in particular illustrates their value.

Mercy says that one of her younger clients was expecting her first child. She was a frightened newcomer to this country, isolated in a different culture and suffering suicidal thoughts as she endured difficulties with her partner as well. Mercy saw her client each week and offered practical help, even helping with baby purchases, and emotional support. She saw her on the ward when the baby was born and now five months later the young mother is happy and coping.

“I have been called the Mother of all Nations because I care for everybody from everywhere,” says Mercy adding: "You have to be a mother, teacher, and counsellor to your patients”.

Inspired by Mercy’s work, one daughter now has ambitions of becoming a midwife, and another a GP.