The Milton Keynes HAGS

117,810 words written to date – On schedule to finish and publish I LOVE OUR NHS – David’s Story in time for Beck’s fifth anniversary.

Today I want to share a chapter which is somewhat local.

 

Within Milton Keynes there are more legends and heritage than can be found in any other town, city or village in the country. FACT.

 Within these legends and heritage there is nothing that can match that of University Hospital Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes has more heritage and more legend per square mile than any other town city or village anywhere in the country. Who in Milton Keynes can remember The MK Hags ?  Have they now become a legend ?  A forgotten legend perhaps ? But just look at the heritage The Milton Keynes Hags have given us.

For the planners within Milton Keynes Development Corporation life must have been something like playing three dimensional chess. Areas of employment had to be created but there was no point in doing this without having housing to accommodate the workers. What was the point of having houses with workers living there if there were no jobs ?  Ashlands in South Milton Keynes was originally a caravan site for workers and Scot of Bletchley Makers of the World’s Finest Cooked Meats used to ‘bus workers in from London every day.

Add to all of this the need to bring in services such as shops, community centres, schools and so on at the right time and in the right place it must have been a nightmare of a job to be a new city planner.

MILTON KEYNES IS DYING FOR A HOSPITAL. That was the motto, slogan, call it what you like of the MK Hags – Milton Keynes Hospital Action Group. Within the designate plan an area of land was set aside on what was to become the Eaglestone Estate where at the right time a hospital was to be constructed. But when was the right time ? The population needed to be large enough to both staff a hospital and to provide the patients. Milton Keynes Hospital Action Group vigorously campaigned to advance the date of the hospital’s opening. Milton Keynes was indeed dying for a hospital. Literally.

Without a hospital the new city was primarily served by Stoke Manderville Hospital in Aylesbury with some patients also being taken to Northampton. The roads we know today between these locations are not the way they were in pre-hospital Milton Keynes. A skilled ambulance driver with blue lights and sirens could perhaps make it to Aylesbury in twenty to twenty-five minutes.

Milton Keynes was dying for  hospital.

It was in the mid 1970’s when I was in the White Hart pub on Whaddon Way, Bletchley, when a young man collapsed to the floor. Everyone thought he was drunk. I can clearly remember someone on each side of him holding him up and trying to walk him about to sober him. A 999 call was made. The duty doctor for the area was on another case so it was a while before he attended. An ambulance came to the pub. The man, I guess he would have been in his late thirties, was not drunk but had suffered a heart attack. He died. Milton Keynes was dying for a hospital.

Milton Keynes did not have a hospital but in Whalley Drive Bletchley there was a maternity unity, Bletchley Maternity Hospital staffed by midwives with GP doctors popping in and out.

14^th September 1980 my wife was a patient with my son reluctant to make his entry to the world. Another lady was in a similar situation. As her husband and I waited we chatted and shared experiences. It was decided in my family’s case to wait and see how things developed but in the other case the flying squad was called in. This was a team of experts who blue lighted their way to Bletchley from Aylesbury, not from Stoke Manderville Hospital but from The Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital which was a specialist maternity unit. Finding the lady was expecting twins and not a single baby she was raced to Aylesbury by ambulance.

It was not the flying squad who decided my wife needed to be moved by ambulance to The Royal Bucks but our family GP, Doctor Labrum.

In Aylesbury I met up again with the gentleman I had spent time with at Bletchley Maternity Hospital. His wife had given birth to a son but his twin brother was still born.

“How am I going to bring my son up,” The gentleman said, “knowing his brother has died ?”

If Milton Keynes had a hospital that child would not have died.  Milton Keynes is dying for a hospital. It was, it most definitely was.

The sophisticated grid road system we know today in the third decades of the twenty-first century was but a series of lines on a plan in those years when Milton Keynes was dying for a hospital. Marlborough Street was an early line to come off the plan and become a length of tarmac. To the south were the estates of Tinkers Bridge, Netherfield, Bean Hill and Coffee Hall. At the northern end was Eaglestone after which Marlborough Street passed through open fields until it met the estates at the other end of the new city’s development plan.

In the Eaglestone field where the hospital would one day be built stood a giant sculptured question mark. I managed to find an image of that sculpture and used it for the cover of my book MILTON DREAMS THE CITY THAT NEVER WAS. I challenge you to make a Google search for that sculpture, you will not succeed. Way back everyone knew it, everyone driving along Marlborough Street saw it but today it is forgotten. A legend it may perhaps be but a legend fast fading. I wonder what ever happened to the question mark, I sadly think it was thrown away. When our hospital came into being, when Milton Keynes Hospital Action Group achieved its aim so there was no need for the statue. Sad it was lost but wonderful it was no longer needed.

Milton Keynes is dying for a hospital ? NOT ANY LONGER ! The MK Hags became a legend as Milton Keynes General Hospital was born.

Entering the hospital from Standing Way today on your left you will find the post graduate centre and a giant multi-storey car park. In the early days this area comprised a ground level paved area for free car parking and a field. Every Sunday this hosted one of the biggest car boot sales in the country. I doubt there is a car boot sale anywhere today to match it in size and number of punters. It was said that the organisers paid the hospital one thousand pounds a week to hire the area. With inflation that would be £3,795 in today’s money. Not bad eh ! With the expansion of the hospital the boot sale has too passed into legend.

Milton Keynes is dying for a hospital became Milton Keynes General Hospital which became University Hospital Milton Keynes. Today our hospital has become a legend it its own time, it may operate under the official name of University Hospital Milton Keynes but in truth it is Beautiful, Incredible, Utterly Amazing, Loving University Hospital Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes Hags what do you think about that ?

I ran twice for election to the hospital board of governors, the second time I lost by six votes. I was very upset, it took me several weeks to get over the pain of not being able to serve our hospital in this way.

University Hospital Milton Keynes is without question one of the finest in the land but it does have a deep-rooted problem. I does not reach out and draw in love from the community. Love to support its work, love to celebrate its staff members and love to help care for its patients.

I discussed this matter with the then chairman of the hospital’s board who agreed with me. I felt it was the job of the governors to undertake this task but it simply was not something members were considering. I, therefore, came up with some ideas of my own and began putting them into actions.

TEEN HERO MK:

This is a project I set up in 2019 and had ready to begin operation in February 2020 but was scuppered by the pandemic. The way things have progressed across the following two years I find myself far from being optimistic that it ever could be revived.

University Hospital Milton Keynes Milton Keynes uses six thousand pints of blood in a year to treat its patients. Once a person reaches their seventeenth birthday they can sign on as a blood donor and give a pint of blood three times a year. TeenHeroMK intended to find two thousand 17+ teenagers to become donors and repay our hospital’s debt to the blood donor system.

Engaging with schools is not the easiest of tasks as such are target driven and do not always have time to focus on projects outside the curriculum and examination system. This is not a criticism but a fact of life. However, I did manage to build a relationship with the headmaster of Oakgrove School, a school with a sound and celebrated reputation within Milton Keynes. This was going to be the project’s lead school from which the project would be rolled out across MK.

Teenagers were inspired and donation times booked. However, the pandemic then thrust all schools into measures which made it impossible to go forward. Everything was put on the back burner and now the project has been cancelled. Although the corona virus situation is very different two years on schools are probably in a harder position now than when the original project was cancelled. There are staff shortages and teenagers are being attacked by the virus.

Cops4Blood

When I was trying to make this project happen in 2019/2020 I mentioned it to a senior community police officer who offered to put himself forward as a donor. From this I suggested Cops4Blood as a way to not only support the cohort of teenagers but also to celebrate the work our police officers do. However, pandemic again and all came to nothing. Add to this a change in officer staffing the idea is a bit dead in the water.

PROJECT WOMBLE

This is something I put together in discussions with Simon Lloyd when he was Chairman of University Hospital Milton Keynes. However, in part due to the tardy and somewhat inefficient operation of the local probation service managing community payback teams and then with the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 it never happened.

University Hospital Milton Keynes is supposedly a non-smoking campus and yet the number of cigarette buts to be found littering the ground is a major problem. So it was when I first put forward this suggestion.

My idea which I put to Simon Lloyd and obtained his agreement was to have a community payback team from the probation service initially clear the site and then to maintain the campus in a more tidy condition. 100% absence of cigarette buts is a major ambition but even one picked up and properly disposed of would be of value. If there is an absence of cigarette buts on the ground then surely smokers are less likely to dispose of their fag ends in this way.

I made an application to the Justice Department and was accepted to have a community payback team undertake the project. However, nobody from the department moved to engage with me in order to make things happen. I repeatedly wrote to the probation service in Milton Keynes without reply. It must have looked to the management of our hospital that I was at fault, failing to deliver on the initiative I put forward.

Finally  I managed to talk with a privatised area of the probation service: Thames Valley Community Rehabilitation Company  This was far from an easy activity within which to engage. Eventually we reached the point where a site inspection was to take place but the pandemic closed all possibilities of such happening.

I have considered trying to revive the projects but do not see the semi-post pandemic society getting behind the ideas.

I LOVE OUR NHS and I LOVE OUR HOSPITAL. I want to do something to take that love out of my heart and wrap it around every staff member and every patient in the hospital. But how ? Perhaps this book in its own way may help.

I am thinking back to my taking my late Father-in-law to hospital. We were waiting in the A & E Department when he said quite loudly: I don’t suppose they give you anything to eat in here do they !

His words were heard by a volunteer who immediately went and fetched him a cheese sandwich !

Volunteers. Unpaid carers of love daily supporting the front-line medical staff. I wonder how many University Hospital Milton Keynes has ? I don’t know and I am not going to try to find out, you simply can not quantify love.

Once upon a time people used to say that nurses were angels. I disagree with that, nurses are not angels they are saints. Within the heaven of saints in University Hospital Milton Keynes, within every hospital in our NHS, can be found the saintly love of volunteers.

Within Milton Keynes there are more legends and heritage than can be found in any other town, city or village in the country. FACT. 

Within these legends and heritage there is nothing that can match that of University Hospital Milton Keynes.