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The Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE) was a United Kingdom trade union representing workers primarily in the National Health Service. It was founded in 1946 with the merger of the Mental Hospital and Institutional Workers Union (MHIWU) and the Hospital and Welfare Services Union (HWSU), with the aim of having one union to represent workers in the National Health Service on its formation.

Early Years
In its early years COHSE drew most of its members from two main groups, psychiatric nurses and the staff of the former Poor Law Infirmaries. This reflected the origins of the unions that constituted the merger, with MHIWU beginning life as the National Asylum Workers Union and HWSU as the Poor Law Workers Trade Union. Psychiatric nurses were the largest group, with mental health workers having the strongest trade union traditions. At the beginning of the 20th Century Britain's mental hospitals were largely run on "custodial" lines, with patients often locked up and staff hired largely for physical strength rather than therapeutic skill. As a consequence, "mental nurses" (sometimes called "attendants") tended to be working-class men and more attracted to union organising than their equivalents in general hospitals, which tended to attract more middle-class women.

By 1946 this had begun to change and many mental nurses (or psychiatric nurses as they came to be known) increasingly looked for recognition of the skilled caring labour they provided rather than their role in restraining patients.

Major COHSE campaigns

 * 1948 Nursing Students Pay
 * 1959 Unofficial Overtime ban
 * 1962 Nurses Pay (Lets twist again)
 * 1972-73 Ancillary Pay strikes (Low pay)
 * 1974 Nurses Pay (Halsbury)
 * 1974 ? Private Patients Dispute
 * 1979 Public Sector Pay (Winter of Discontent)
 * 1982 NHS Staff Pay campaign (12%claim)
 * 1988 Nurses Pay (Clinical Grading)
 * 1989-1990 Ambulance Dispute

Merge
In 1993, COHSE merged with two other trade unions - NUPE (the National Union of Public Employees) and NALGO (the National Association of Local Government Officers) - to form UNISON, the largest public sector trade union in the UK.

General Secretaries

 * 1946: George Gibson
 * 1947: Cliff Comer
 * 1953: Jack Waite
 * 1958: Jack Jepson
 * 1967: Dick Akers
 * 1969: Frank Lynch
 * 1974: Albert Spanswick
 * 1983: David Williams
 * 1987: Hector MacKenzie

Presidents

 * 1946: Claude Bartlett
 * 1962: Ron Farmer
 * 1965: Bob Vickerstaff
 * 1976: Eric Wilson
 * 1982: Sid Ambler
 * 1987: Colin Robinson