My Hospital

I trained and worked at a small district general hospital in a socio-economically deprived area of the UK, where health problems were rife.

The original hospital, like so many others, was built in the late Victorian period, on a hill, with quite lovely views over the surrounding areas, until they were all eventually lost in a morass of house and industry building.

It`s still a source of amazement to me how ill folk, or the elderly, were supposed to make their way up a fairly steep hill; when I was pregnant and my colleagues there did my antenatal care, I found it really hard going to walk up from the car-park to the ante-natal clinic.


The original buildings were lovely red-brick, and as the hospital grew and the NHS began, more and more was added on until the hospital became a sprawling mass of concrete and glass blocks and corridors, which was completely baffling to visitors and often to the staff when we had to go to unfamiliar departments......


Maternity was a relatively modern building, lots of glass. A nightmare to clean, no doubt; it was draughty and cold in the winter, when the savage winds whipped and howled around the hillside, and unbearably stuffy and hot in the summer. We had three small mixed antenatal and postnatal wards, a Labour ward with self-contained obstetric theatre and an ante-natal clinic as well as an adjacent Special Care Baby Unit. We couldn`t cope with extremely premature babies, who would have to be transferred to the Big City for care, but we did our best.


My youngest child was one of the last to be born there, surrounded by the loving care of my friends and colleagues, and I have many memories of the time I worked there. Now, under the ravages of Socialist Britain under the Blairs, it is no more - closed, demolished, and the site sold to the highest bidder for redevelopment. I haven`t had the heart to go back and see what they have done to the site.
I prefer to keep my memories intact.