1. Early Life and Education

2. Nursing Career

3. Later Life and Work in Spiritual Direction

4. Main Published Works

5. References

Rev. Prof. Stephen Graham Wright FRCN MBE (born 20 September 1949) is a spiritual director for the Sacred Space Foundation, author^[1], and recipient of a Fellowship of the Royal College of Nursing. He is known for his innovations in nursing training and education, his consultancy with the British Council and World Health Organisation, and for creating the first consultant nurse role within the National Health Service (NHS). In his later years, he helped to establish the Sacred Space Foundation, and continues to offer spiritual direction and author books on the subject of spiritual seeking. He currently serves as a spiritual director of the Sacred Space Foundation.

Early Life and Education

Stephen Wright grew up in a working class background in Radcliffe, Manchester. He attended a modern secondary school in Radcliffe before transferring to Stand Grammar School in 1963. After completing his studies in 1967 he worked for 2 years as a trainee tax officer with Inland Revenue before moving to London in 1969, where he worked as a management trainee with Union International Ltd. He left London in early 1970 to travel throughout Europe, staying in Gibraltar in the summer of 1970 to work various service industry jobs in Gibraltar. He returned to the UK in late 1970. After successful application to nursing school, Wright worked temporarily as a nursing auxiliary at Fairfield General Hospital before beginning nursing training in January 1971. During his studies Wright was awarded a Rotary Club sponsorship to study nursing in France and the Netherlands. He also became an active member of the Royal College of Nursing. Following his qualification as a general nurse in 1974, Wright worked in various hospitals in the northwest of England while studying part-time for the Diploma in Nursing at colleges in Blackburn and Salford, eventually becoming a clinical teacher at Tameside and Glossop School of Nursing. In 1979 he was sponsored by Glossop to study the Diploma in Advanced Nursing Studies and Master’s Degree in Nursing at the University of Manchester.

Nursing Career

In late 1981, Wright returned to Tameside, where he was invited to take up the role of nurse teacher and charge nurse, a ‘joint appointment’^[2] role in the elderly care unit. The intention was to improve the learning climate for students and act as a change agent to improve care for patients in a care unit that was perceived at the time as offering poor quality of care.^[3][4] This joint appointment role was the first of its kind between a mainstream NHS hospital and a school of nursing and was modelled on that which was developed between the university and hospital in central Manchester.^[5] Under his leadership, more joint appointments were made and independent evaluation demonstrated significant improvements in patient care and staff experience.^[6] The unit became part of the Nursing Development Unit movement^[7] of the 1980’s, which received considerable government attention and sponsorship.^[8][9] Salvage’s study^[10] describes this period as the ‘New Nursing’ when there was a burgeoning interest in nursing innovations, fostered in part by greater numbers of educated nurses emerging from Master’s programmes such as that in Manchester, as well as changes in the UK’s NHS, the roles of women and in nursing education.

Apart from participating in these innovations in clinical nursing, Wright began to contribute more as a teacher of nursing practice across the UK and abroad and began a period of prolific writing and research about nursing, most significantly in the field of nursing theory^[11], change management^[12][13], nursing older people^[14] and patient-centred nursing^[15][16]. He became a consultant to the King’s Fund, the WHO (Europe), the Open University and the British Council.

Wright became the first consultant nurse in the NHS in 1986^[17], creating the role for himself, a move that subsequently influenced the development of more such roles in the NHS as government policy in 1997.^[18][19] In the meantime he was elected to council of the Royal College of Nursing (serving 6 years) and chaired its nursing policy and practice, ethics and international committees, which contributed to many nursing policy and practice development initiatives, especially in relation to the emerging AIDS crisis in the late 1980’s.^[20][21] His role took him to over 60 countries as conference speaker, course teacher and government adviser in the development of nursing services and he helped set up Nursing Development Units in Slovenia, Romania, Poland, Spain, Ireland and Germany^[22][23], as well as a nursing exchange programme between Tameside Hospital and Emory University Hospital^[24], Atlanta, USA. He was offered visiting professorships at the Universities of Cumbria and Southampton. While continuing to work at Tameside, he set up the European Nursing Development Agency^[25] to seek funds and support for these projects and worked with the WHO (Europe) on various nursing leadership programmes in the UK, Russia, Poland, Denmark and the then republic of Czechoslovakia.^[26]

Wright participated in or chaired many local and national committees, editorial boards concerning nursing and health care and wrote prolifically in many books, journals and distance learning projects^[27][28][29] on nursing, in addition to making numerous television and radio appearances, including acting as consultant to and participating in two television series on nursing: a Yorkshire Television series ‘Return to Nursing’ (1990) and the BBC Series “No more Nightingales” (1991). He was honored with a Fellowship of the Royal College of Nursing in 1991 and an MBE by HM the Queen for his services to nursing in 1992. In 1993 he was seconded for two years to NHS (England) as part of the Patients’ Charter Team^[30], taking the lead on developing the Named Nurse^[31] policy (intended that every patient should have an identifiable nurse responsible for their care) and producing the definitive text on the theme and other research on mixed sex wards, patient centred care and complementary therapies.^{[32][33][34][35]} He was commissioned by the RCN to lead a major research project on the future of nursing^[36] in 1998 as well as to chair several inquiries into settings where patient care had failed, producing confidential reports for Charitable and NHS Trusts.

In the late 1980’s Wright developed a particular interest in the application of complementary therapies to patient care, lecturing widely on the theme, setting up the journal Complementary Therapies in Nursing^[37] first published by Churchill Livingstone, promoting the development of an influential special interest group in the Royal College of Nursing and participating in HRH the Prince of Wales’ Integration of Complementary and Orthodox Medicine Advisory Group.^[38] At about the same time he also developed a personal and professional interest in the connection between spirituality and health^[39][40][41], editing Spirituality and Health International from 1999-2008 and writing a regular monthly column in Nursing Standard from 1997 to 2015 on the theme, receiving highly commended awards from the Professional Publications Awards in 2004 and 2005. In 2010 he received a Fellowship of the University of Cumbria for his studies and teachings on the theme.

Later Life and Work in Spiritual Direction

Wright's interest in the connection between spirituality and health was not just academic, as many of his writings in Nursing Standard and the account in his semi-autobiographical guide on spiritual awakening illuminated.^[42] It was also rooted in a shift in “a way of seeing”^[43] his life and goals through a series of transformative spiritual experiences. He studied with a number of significant teachers including Jean Sayre-Adams of the Sacred Space Foundation^[44], Michael Harner, Jack Kornfield, Stan Grof, most continuously Ram Dass and on many retreats in the presence of Mother Meera. It is with Jean Sayre-Adams that he developed the most life-transforming day-to-day relationship and Wright has acknowledged her as his ‘soul midwife’ in Coming Home.^[45] Out of this relationship the work of the Sacred Space Foundation emerged and continues to this day. This inner work led him to begin a significant shift in his personal and work life and towards an effort to integrate spiritual insights and principles into his work and teachings. To further this integration he trained as an interfaith minister and spiritual director at the Interfaith Seminary (now One Spirit Interfaith Foundation^[46]) and was ordained in 2003. He participated in numerous retreats and study programmes in Christianity, especially Christian spirituality, mysticism and contemplation and was hallowed as a member of the Iona Community^[47] in 2011. His current work focuses on spiritual direction with retreatants at the Sacred Space Foundation, facilitating retreats around the UK, teaching compassion programmes in the NHS^[48] as well as authoring further works of poetry, music and spiritual development.

Main Published Works

References

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