I left Ireland in 1976 to undertake nurse training in England. My first training was, as it was then known , to become a Registered Nurse for the Mentally Subnormal. Thankfully we have moved on from those days and increasingly treat people with more respect and focus on their abilities rather than disabilities.
My 3 year training was spent in an eleven hundred bed hospital for people with intellectual disability and some with attendant physical, behavioural and mental health challenges. These challenges were deemed by society at that time as being of such severity as to warrant admission on an ongoing basis to Leybourne Grange Hospital in Kent. It was run by the National Health Service and staffed with medical, nursing and ancillary staff. This time shaped the rest of my forty years in human services which was spent in various services helping people to live ordinary lives in ordinary settings.
This memoir is presented as a series of anecdotes from that time. It aims to display the power imbalance between staff and patients and the effect of that imbalance on both groups.
The resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity and the effects of institutional models of care is presented in a tell it like it was for real people style rather than some academic discussion on the nature of institutions and their effect.
The book ends with some accounts of people who successfully left the institution during the hospital closure program of the 1980’s to take up their place in ordinary society. There is ,however, a cautionary note in my meeting with Cedric that ordinary society cannot always be assumed to offer improvement on what went before.
We are all individuals. What is required are individual packages of support as opposed to a one size fits all approach so beloved of policy makers and service providers. There is little point swapping one institution for another.
A Touch of the Ordinary is available on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk. Search under the book section by title.
The Scribbler Griffin 