Health – Page 2 – Journeys of Heart and Mind

Cirencester Hospital

The old house is still interesting on the inside, at least one beautifully oak-panelled room is now a patient waiting room, and gives a hint of how the house would have appeared in its heyday.

< Previous | Index | Next >

Image 104 – What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every day or so.

Cirencester had two hospitals in the 1950s. There was the Cirencester Memorial Hospital, the main part of which was demolished recently and is now one of the town’s car parks. And in 1948, the new NHS took over a large house near the Bull Ring (the town’s Roman Amphitheatre) and converted it internally as a maternity hospital – The Querns Maternity Hospital. Later, this was repurposed again as a general hospital and modern extensions were added. The Memorial Hospital closed.

The photo shows the rear view of the old house, you can see part of a modern extension on the extreme left. The old house is still interesting on the inside, at least one beautifully oak-panelled room is now a patient waiting room, and gives a hint of how the house would have appeared in its heyday.

I was born in this building when it was a maternity hospital, I was either the first or the second baby after the hospital opened in 1948.

Today, the NHS is struggling with insufficient funding and too few staff leading to long waiting times and impacting the wellbeing of patients, I hope the present government will be able to start correcting this, bringing the service back to full strength and effectiveness. That aside, the NHS remains a wonderful service for everyone who lives in the UK, a job it’s been doing for more than 70 years.

When: 9th January 2024
Where: Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Cirencester

For convenience, here’s a list of all the Cirencester area images:

A417 roadworks, Advent Market, Bishops Walk, Baunton, Canal 1, 2, Castle Street, Christmas lights 1, 2, Church 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Churn flood, Countryside, Fallen tree, Fleece, Gasworks, Gloucester Street, Hare 1, 2, Hospital, Market Place 1, Phoenix Fest, Riverside Walk, Stone plaque, Stratton Meadow, Tank traps, View, Wonky 1, 2, Yellow Iris

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

< Previous | Index | Next >

Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

Image of the day – 17

When you eat makes a huge difference to health, wellbeing, and even the length of your life.

< Previous | Index | Next >

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.

I’m posting an image every day (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.

Food! You can’t live without it, it provides the energy for all your conscious activities and also the energy to keep your body working – the brain, the liver, lungs, heart, kidneys, even the digestive tract that digests your food – all the organs need energy to do their various essential jobs that you rarely think about.

But also, too much food is bad for you, the wrong kind of food is bad for you, and when you eat it makes a huge difference to health, wellbeing, and even the length of your life.

There’s plenty of good advice out there, but many of us fail to follow it. If you haven’t thought about this very much, right now is a good time to start. Where to look? The UK’s NHS provides some good ideas. So too does ZOE. Maybe watch a ZOE video, pick one that seems interesting to you.

Food – Enjoy it, but rule it. Don’t let it rule you!

PS – Think about others too. If you can afford it, donate some items to your local foodbank (most supermarkets have donation points). And if you are unable to afford what you need, get along to a local foodbank and ask for help. The Trussell Trust is one of the big organisations, search for a local branch. Or search Google for other options.

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

< Previous | Index | Next >

Useful? Interesting?

Blast from the past… 5

Do things when you can. Don’t wait, don’t hesitate, who knows what tomorrow might bring…

< Previous | Index | Next >

Notes from bygone years – A load of Aprils

A year ago

I didn’t post an article in April 2022, but Donna and I visited Weston-super-Mare and I spotted this fruit and vegetable shop in one of the back streets. There were strawberries here, but they’re not in season; there were pineapples but those don’t grow in the UK; there were pears that should be ready to pick in September or October. Almost nothing in this shop was grown locally. Why?

It’s lovely to have choices like this, but they come at a cost to the environment that we usually overlook. The solution lies in my pocket and yours; we should try to buy locally produced fruit and vegetables that are within a few weeks of being in season.

Two years ago

No blog posts in April 2021 either, but on 4th April the weather was warm and bright and we enjoyed eating outside for the first time in 2021.

But oh my word, look at the same table just three days later. Snow! The moral of this little story is plain, do things while you can. Don’t wait, don’t hesitate, who knows what tomorrow might bring…

Five years ago

In April 2018 I had a bit of a rant about rescuing Britain from the dreadful mess it seemed to be in. I grumbled about the effects of Brexit, about poverty, the underfunded health service, an underfunded education system, the need for food-banks, the excessive cost of homes.

Read the article. Let me know if you think things have improved in the last five years.

Ten years ago

In April 2013 I wrote about ‘Men, women and children‘. The topic really was leadership, and I stand by all I wrote at that time.

Can men lead in church? How about women, are they allowed to lead? And what about children? Perhaps it depends who you ask, there are different opinions and different traditions.

Read my post from ten years ago and let me know what your views are.

Fifteen years ago

There was no article in April 2008. However, we had a holiday in Catalonia and visited Barcelona where we took a look at the famous Sagrada Familia with its amazing ‘biological’ shapes. What an astonishing place it it!

To learn more about this wonderful feat of design and engineering by the architect Antoni Gaudi, read the Wikipedia article.

Twenty years ago

In April 2003, I wrote about a meeting at home. Father spoke to us about leadership, coincidentally I drew on what I’d learned in this meeting when I wrote the article mentioned in the ‘Ten years ago’ section above!

We are weak, like freshly poured concrete; but Jesus is patient and knows we will become strong enough for the task he’s given us.

Twenty-five years ago

In April 1998, Donna and I were on our way home from our honeymoon in Florida, and I began a new job at Unilever’s Colworth Laboratory north of Bedford.

Thirty years ago

In April 1995 my first wife, Judy, was recovering from failed chemotherapy for bowel cancer metastases. Clearly this was not a great situation, but she was fitter than she had been since before her operation to remove the primary tumour. We began meeting again at home with friends in Yatton, near Bristol, where we lived. These were by far the best meetings with friends in Jesus’ presence that any of us had ever experienced. Awesome and hard to describe adequately.

Erm… I can’t count! That was not thirty years ago, it was twenty-eight years ago! Ah well, I’ll let it stand.

Thirty years ago

I’ll try again! In April 1993 Judy and I were living in Yatton with our daughters, and my Mum and Dad visited us on 15th. We drove into Bristol and looked around the covered market and The Galleries shopping centre.

< Previous | Index | Next >

Covid-19 risk assessment

It is humorous enough that you want to read it, yet it still helps to remind you of the real dangers

I love this, popularised on Twitter by Alice Roberts. It is humorous enough that you want to read it, yet it still helps to remind you of the real dangers, and makes you think about the fact that some risks are greater than others.

Brilliant! Stay in the green where possible, everyone.

Eradicating coronavirus

By determined and sustained action the virus can be confined and eliminated

There’s lots of good advice out there about combatting the Covid-19 disease as it continues to ramp up around the world. Official figures at the time of writing are ten million infected and half a million dead; the true figures are almost certainly far higher than that. But those numbers are rising daily – who knows where we’ll be this time next year.

A virtual model of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (image copyright Wikimedia)

There have been successes in eliminating human diseases in the past, smallpox in 1977, and polio (close to extinction but still persisting at low levels in Afghanistan and Pakistan). In both cases, progress was achieved by use of vaccines that provide lifetime immunity.

Is this possible for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19? The simple answer is that we don’t know; many vaccine candidates are being developed, but it will be some time before we find out how effective they will be, nor do we yet know how long immunity might last.

A vaccine would help, but we do have some other ways to attempt eradication. Countries like New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam might give us a clue. By determined and sustained action the virus can be confined and eliminated so that only importing it from an external source can bring it back; we have seen this happen several times.

So here’s a strategy that is worth considering

Use restrictions on movement and contact to reduce the size of the infection in a defined area. This has been done many times already in areas from whole nations to small districts. We know it works.
Test and trace while cautiously lifting restrictions, re-imposing them quickly wherever there is a local resurgence.
Once the defined area is free of virus, allow life to return to normal except for travel into the area. Use strict quarantine measures to contain new imports.
When two or more adjacent areas achieve step 3, their common borders can be opened.

Such a strategy has the potential to rid larger and larger parts of the globe of Covid. Would it be easy to do? No, it would be hard work, costly and it would demand constant vigilence as well as coordination by a body like the World Health Organisation. And we won’t know if its possible unless we make the attempt. Would it be worth it? Almost certainly if we can get something like this agreed internationally and adequately funded. Less wealthy nations with limited health care resources would need monetary and practical help along the way. The economic costs of eradication would be very large, but the ongoing annual costs of living with Covid-19 will be larger still.

Maybe it’s too early to start a Covid-19 eradication programme, but it’s certainly time to begin conversations about one.