I worked in Friern Hospital in the ´70s for a year or so as a student psychiatric nurse. It was a mental hospital built originally in Victorian times as an asylum, and absolutely enormous. In the past it had been self sufficient with its own bakery, brewery, laundry and farm and several additional villas and had housed up to 2,500 patients. It reputedly had the longest corridor in Europe!
Quite frankly I did not enjoy my time there and gave up my course before qualifying. It was a pretty grim place and many of the patients had spent most of their lives there and were very institutionalized. If you had the time to chat to the patients there were some very sad stories as well as interesting ones. One very old lady had been seamstress to Queen Victoria and another, with a very upper-class accent, had run away from home to march with the suffragettes in London.
The hospital eventually closed down in the ´90s due, I believe, to the ´care in the community`initiative which meant many patients were discharged into the community and the demand for psychiatric hospital beds greatly decreased. While that sounds like a good idea I think many people fell through the cracks in the system. I can´t help wondering whether a thoroughly updated, bright and welcoming hospital wouldn´t be a better and safer option for them, especially those living on the streets.
I worked at the West Cheshire in Chester and Bootham Park in York
ReplyDeleteI see from your blog that you trained a few years after me...acute admissions must have been very demanding. There was a lot wrong with the system in those days. I remember once being lock in a padded cell for the afternoon with a very distressed and aggressive patient as Sister thought I could calm her down. Every 30 minutes or so someone would peep through the spy-hole to make sure I was alright!
DeleteI mentioned to John that I took up a place in an NHS trainee management scheme and spent 18 months in the psychiatric hospitals in Norwich, two very large Victorian asylums in the late 1970s. My experience in NHS management was not my cup of tea and I left half way through and is a separate story in itself which I often refer to when talking about the NHS today and am supported by many who say that not much, if anything, has changed by those on the inside. Whilst there I learned a lot about the old asylums in my duties as the general admin assistant dealing with all sorts of things for the General Manager of Psychiatric Services as my training was actually working in an administration position. On my first day without any training or help I had to receive some relatives of an elderly lady who had been in the asylum since 1932. I was quite young at the time and it is an understatement to say I was gobsmacked. I soon learned that there were wards full of these elderly people and I came to deal with many as they were all reaching the ages of 80s and 90s and coming to the end of their lives having spent 59 or more years in the asylum, forgotten about mostly.
ReplyDeleteI agree Rachel, there were some very sad cases and I found it difficult and depressing working with them. As I said in my post, I didn´t finish my training, it wasn´t my cup of tea either.
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