Red Cross Blogs

Spring cleaning through history

By Jim Griffin
August 19, 2009 at 3:00 pm

(Pool car whiff update: Mini valet completed. Pong reduced to week-old dustbin.)

The Red Cross recently redrew a branch boundary making me the right honourable service manager for a larger chunk of North Lanarkshire. The Cumbernauld and Kilsyth area now falls into West Central and South West Scotland complete with a large building and a small but dedicated team of volunteers.

Recruitment is storming ahead to support the medical equipment and therapeutic care services and launch skin camouflage, care in the home and the transport service. We’re hoping to find room in the budget for a small refit of the medical equipment area to allow for separation of clean and dirty equipment and set up a maintenance area for repairing damaged or worn wheelchairs. Next week I’m meeting with managers from three care homes to see how the therapeutic care service is going down.

We’ve spent the last couple of Fridays spring cleaning the building and have found some gems from a bygone age. We came across bandage packs on top of a 12-foot high cupboard undisturbed since 1963. We found porcelain bed pans and urinals from the days before single use items came along. And we found oxygen cylinders in leather holders that probably first saw service in an air raid shelter.

What we’d really found was a history of people serving their community year after year, manager after manager, boundary change after boundary change. And the work we’re doing will ensure we continue to serve our community through the years and managers and boundaries to come.

Placing our relaunch in the context of history is the kind of thing that would make me feel somehow insignificant had I not already reached immortality through this blog, a creative endeavour whose legacy will survive as long as the renaissance or the work of the old masters or the stink in the pool car.

Image: © ICRC

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Tags: care in the home, Lanarkshire, medical equipment, Skin Camouflage, Therapeutic Care, transport service

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Health and social care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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