An Oral History of District Nursing in Liverpool: Professional Identity, Community and Home

Owens, J (2026) An Oral History of District Nursing in Liverpool: Professional Identity, Community and Home. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool John Moores University.

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Abstract

This thesis, An Oral History of District Nursing in Liverpool: Professional Identity, Community and Home, examines district nursing in Liverpool between 1945 and 2000 through oral history interviews with retired district nurses. It analyses how the interviewees’ recollections contribute to understandings of professional identity, community and home. The study is based on seven oral history interviews, conducted in person and remotely, using a semi structured approach that supported extended narrative and reflection on working lives. Interview testimony is placed in dialogue with documentary sources related to district nursing in Britain, including papers of the Queen’s Nursing Institute held at the Wellcome Collection and government records at The National Archives. These materials are used to establish historical and institutional context, but they are not used to verify or arbitrate the truth of individual accounts. The analytical emphasis remains on what interviewees chose to narrate, how they narrated it, and what meanings they attached to practice in retrospect.
This thesis develops three connected arguments. First, it demonstrates that professional identity in district nursing was produced through negotiation rather than fixed status. Interviewees described professional identity as grounded in clinical judgement and responsibility, the management of relationships with patients, their families and healthcare professionals and respecting the domestic setting. Second, it argues that community functioned as both a geographical and relational space. Nurses remembered their practice as embedded in neighbourhood routines and local knowledge, while also being reshaped by organisational change and shifting expectations of community-based care across the second half of the twentieth century. Third, it argues that home functioned as a distinctive workplace that shaped the delivery of care and the organisation of nurses’ labour. Working in patients’ homes required continual negotiation of professional boundaries and personal intimacy, while nurses’ own homes and domestic responsibilities were threaded through their recollections of working life. Methodologically, the thesis reflects on the selective and situated nature of memory, the intersubjective dynamics of the interview encounter, and the limits of representativeness within an intimate sample, emphasising depth of testimony and analytic insight.
By centring district nurses’ testimonies and reading them alongside documentary sources of policy and professional regulation, the thesis contributes to histories of nursing and post-war healthcare. In doing so, it demonstrates how district nursing was shaped and understood through everyday practice in streets, clinics and homes, and through the gendered organisation of work and care.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	History; Gender; District Nursing; Professional Identity; Community; Home; Oral History; Liverpool History
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races R Medicine > RT Nursing
Divisions:	Nursing, Public and Allied Health
Date of acceptance:	17 September 2026
Date of first compliant Open Access:	24 September 2026
Date Deposited:	24 Sep 2026 15:27
Last Modified:	24 Sep 2026 15:27
DOI or ID number:	10.24377/LJMU.t.00029474
Supervisors:	Hayes, J-A and Matthews-Jones, L
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29474

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