As part of our series of blogs about the upcoming vote on WI resolutions (for more details, see our earlier blog post), we examine the NHS and its provision of non-acute hospital beds. We’re writing these posts to kick-start the debate about these issues in advance of our November meeting; they don’t reflect any particular view or an ‘official’ view of the Sotonettes Committee so please read them with that in mind.  We want to know what our members think so please let us know on Facebook or Twitter.

“This meeting urges every NHS Trust to maintain or increase the number of non-acute hospital beds.”

Our population has changed dramatically since the NHS was founded in 1948. People are living longer with those over the age of 60 making up a quarter of the population. This has had a direct impact on NHS hospitals: around 25% of hospital inpatients have dementia and almost two thirds of hospital admissions are people aged over 65. People over 85 years spend on average 8 days longer in hospital than those under the age of 65.

The number of hospital beds has decreased by a third in the last 25 years, yet admissions have increased. Despite the high cost of hospital care the NHS has few alternatives.

Although emergency departments and acute hospital wards are there to cater for people in time of crisis and need, they are not always the most appropriate places and there is often a lack of community services, e.g. for the elderly patient who may need extra support for day to day tasks due to dementia but is other wise ‘fit and well’.

This increases unnecessary admissions to hospitals and prolongs the length of stay for patients, increases waiting times and puts strain on what few beds there are in hospitals. Whilst in hospital, elderly patients are often moved up to four times from ward to ward and continuity of care suffers. Studies show that 40% of people who die in hospital do not have medical needs requiring them to be there at the time.

Much more can be done to prevent unnecessary hospital admission and readmission, shorten the length of stay and ensure the smooth and effective transfer of care for patients ready to leave hospital. Areas with integrated services for older people have lower rates of bed use; these hospitals also tend to have lower admission rates and deliver good patient experience.

It is clear that the NHS must review the way in which people are admitted, ensure that acute hospital beds are used appropriately and ensure that services are put into place to help facilitate smooth discharge and continuing care for the elderly in their own communities.

The BBC have recently reported on the issues surrounding patients being discharged from hospital – read the article.

Halloween is over, bonfire night will soon be past and the decorations are already in the shops… it must mean it’s almost Christmas!  We’ve tried to avoid that particular ‘C-word’ until now but unfortunately it’s less than 2 months away!

Since the Sotonettes usually meet on the last Tuesday of every month, we never have a December meeting as it’s always too close to Christmas and New Year.  This year, instead of missing out completely, we’re arranging an evening out for all our members and their friends/family/partners/children to go and see The Nutcracker at the Nuffield Theatre.  It sounds like it will be a brilliant production – if you’d like to know more about it, have a look at the Nuffield Theatre website.

The important details:

When: Thursday 5th December, 7pm

Where: The Nuffield Theatre, University Road, Southampton, SO17 1TR

How much: £9 each

The committee have made a flexible block booking for the evening so hopefully everyone who’d like to come along can get a ticket and we can all sit together.  Numbers are limited though, so it will be first come, first served.

If you’d like to join us, and we really hope you will, please email us at sotonettes@gmail.com with the number of tickets you’d like.  If you want to pay by electronic bank transfer we’ll email you back the details, or you can pay by cash/cheque to any committee member at our upcoming craft meeting, book club or main November meeting.  If you won’t be at any of those meetings, let us know and you can give us the money on the night.

We’ve also created a Facebook event for this evening’s festivities – you can find it at: https://www.facebook.com/#!/events/1430425537181544/

If this has got you in the theatrical mood, don’t forget about our visit to see Frankenstein at the Harbour Lights Picturehouse on Thursday November 14th!  More details in our blog post here and on Facebook.

Some of you may be wondering what next week’s meeting is all about.  Our theme is Theatre – we hope to inspire you with costumes from the Hampshire Wardrobe and learn all about Southampton’s fantastic Nuffield Theatre too.  As a reminder, our meeting will at the Slug & Lettuce, Above Bar Street at 7.30pm on Tuesday 29th October.

To give you a little taster our speaker, Tracey Cruickshank (Audience Development and Marketing Officer) at the Nuffield Theatre has kindly written us a blog post to tempt you all along next Tuesday.  Enjoy!

“I came to the Nuffield just over four years ago, after running a circus, working in the circus ring, teaching performing arts and working for the NHS – a very varied career, but one that always had people and the arts at the core. Because the Nuffield makes its own work, as well as having visiting companies in, there’s never a shortage of actors, directors, designers, writers, etc. floating about the place requiring some sort of attention or support.

Although my job is about the audiences for the Nuffield – getting more people in, plus enhancing the experience of those who do visit – it ranges further and wider than that, often branching into all sorts of things. It seems to be the nature of working in this industry.

Our last Artistic Director, Patrick Sandford, was very fond of volunteering members of staff to take part in his productions. This would start as a walk-on part (“I promise you’ll be home by 8”), and would gradually be added to, so that by the end of it you were there until the end of the performance most nights, and had lines and/or important prop moving built in. Hence I’ve had the pleasure of being a mourning woman in The House of Bernarda Alba with Ann Mitchell of EastEnders fame (I actually had lines with her!), and an Afghan woman in Bully Boy with Anthony Andrews (The King’s Speech, Brideshead Revisited, etc). Probably one of the more surreal moments of my life was standing in the wings next to Anthony Andrews in a full burka, hoping he would realise that it was my costume that stank and not me! That and Sandi Toksvig wishing me ‘good Afghaning’ in the loo on press night….

The Marketing department have often had to dress up in costume for a photoshoot for the Christmas show posters and flyers, as the actors aren’t usually cast yet. One year some of us had to dress up as characters from The Wind in the Willows in full skins in the June heat, standing in a river at 7 in the morning.

Besides my occasional moment in the limelight, I have also had to take actors and directors to radio interviews. This is great for getting to know them a bit better, which is always a good thing when you’re marketing a show. Matthew Kelly was particularly good fun recently, full of anecdotes and gossip on the way to the studio, tired though he was the morning after press night. I managed to get him to agree to an interview at some god-awful time in the morning on the Wave 105 breakfast show. Think the promise of a bacon sandwich swung it.

But it’s not all about the actors, even though that’s often the most interesting and visible part for people outside the industry. I have to know as much about a production as possible in order to know who is likely to want to see it. So I’m fortunate enough to read newly commissioned scripts, sit in first read-throughs with the actors, directors, designers and production crew for a new production, plus see technical and dress rehearsals of all our productions. I also have the opportunity to meet some of the best touring companies in the business such as Frantic Assembly and ETT.

Probably the best part of my job is meeting our audiences, whether they’ve been coming for years, it’s their first visit or they’re thinking about visiting. Some of my most satisfying moments include watching a group of ‘difficult to reach’ young people totally absorbed in Romeo and Juliet and then giving excited and hugely positive feedback at the end. Standing in Guildhall Square while 7,000 plus people cheered at some mad French aerialists drumming 60 feet above them made me feel pretty good too. It’s always the best feeling to be there at the start of someone’s love affair with the theatre. Most of all, I get to work in an industry I love, a part of our culture which I think is fundamental to who we are as people, and which undoubtedly contributes a large amount to our national wellbeing.”

Hi everyone!  

We’ll be making some big changes to the Sotonettes website in the next month – due to this, we’ve had to move webhosts and also change our blog a little bit too.  

If you follow this blog (you’ll probably be emailed a notification that we’ve put up this post if you do), we’d like you to follow our new one now please!  

The new blog is at www.sotonettes.co.uk (this one is on sotonettes.wordpress.com). Just go to www.sotonettes.co.uk and look on the right hand side of the page – you may need to scroll down a little – until you find the box named ‘Subscribe to Sotonettes Blog by email’.  Just pop in your email address and click the Subscribe button and you’ll never miss another one of our informative ramblings again.

Apologies for the inconvenience of all this – hopefully you’ll be seeing a bigger and better Sotonettes website soon!

Jen (Sotonettes webmistress)

After a few dodgy days of typical bank holiday weather, the committee’s sun dances have paid off and it’s an absolutely brilliant day for a meeting outside!

For anyone who has missed all the pre-amble (!) about our walk, the original blog post about our August meeting are here.  Please bring appropriate footwear, meet us at the Hawthorns Centre (SO15 7NN) at 7.30 and enjoy a picnic with our members before setting off for a guided walk around Southampton Common.  If you have a torch, bring it along too as it’ll be dark once we’ve finished! If you can bring a picnic dish to share too, that’d be lovely – we’re supplying some picnic stuff but we’d love to have a varied and tasty spread!

Time to make sandwiches for the picnic now, but we’re all looking forward to seeing you tonight.  Any questions, get in touch!