Month: May 2020

Hosting a hospital – how an NHS Nightingale hospital was created in three weeks at UWE Bristol

Author UWE Bristol media team | Posted on

By Professor Steve West, Vice-Chancellor at UWE Bristol

As the COVID-19 pandemic has taken hold of the country, universities have radically changed how they operate to best support students and staff, and UWE Bristol is no different. But alongside all of our efforts to ensure that our students’ academic and student experience is able to continue virtually, we have also found ourselves as one of the hosts for an NHS Nightingale Hospital on our Frenchay campus.

Creating a 300-bed hospital in our Exhibition and Conference Centre (ECC) has been no mean feat, but when we were approached by the NHS, it was a very easy decision for us to offer everything we could to help. Along with many universities, UWE Bristol has a very long history of being embedded in its local community, and if this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the importance of community support and collaboration to tackle the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in. Universities are uniquely placed to help in the current crisis, so we knew that no matter how complex the creation of this hospital would be, we were ready to get involved.

Although the prospect of having a fully operational intensive care bed hospital on our campus has been daunting at times, the reality of the construction has been remarkably smooth. I have been on the project from the outset with fantastic colleagues at all levels and disciplines playing their part in delivering this facility. Our collective effort has given hope to NHS frontline staff, and the hospital is now ready if needed to treat the sickest patients battling COVID-19.

We were first approached in late March, when a team from land surveyors CBRE, the NHS, plus the Army Logistics team, arrived onto campus to survey the ECC and surrounding area. A project team was established and after that things began to move extremely quickly, with a full project Board established two days later and increasing numbers of Kier, NHS and contractor staff arriving on site.

We collaborated with the NHS and Kier leads from the very beginning, which was essential as there was an ambitious 15 day build plan to deliver 300 fully ventilated beds in one building – one that is usually put to use for everything from student exams to events to weddings, so it has been incredible to witness how it has been turned into such a different facility.

For me, one of the most important aspects of this whole project has been ensuring that we are not simply a geographical location for the hospital but a partner in this endeavour, consistently looking for new ways to support and adapt to having this facility on campus. To that end, we provided a bespoke 2 day training programme for volunteers to be able to work safely in the Nightingale which was designed and delivered for over 350 people over the Easter break, and UWE Bristol Academic and Technical Teams also started to train clinical leads and staff in the Nightingale protocols. We have been providing 1000s of litres of disinfectant and hand gel to the site, GP, practices, pharmacies and even the local businesses such as Rolls Royce and Airbus to keep the economy moving, and now we have begun making face visors in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

For now, the hospital stands ready if required, and the NHS continue to have our full support. Following the official opening of the hospital last week, we are now working very closely with NHS colleagues across the region to determine how the facility might change and adapt as the disease progresses and clinical needs change.

The fact that we are host to such an important part of the UK’s fight against COVID-19 is a source of great pride to our staff and students. While having a hospital spring up in the space of two weeks across from my office is not something I could ever have predicted at the start of the year, everyone here has risen to the challenge with all the energy, willingness to collaborate and community spirit I’ve come to expect from our students and staff. This is us at our best, and demonstrates how we and the higher education sector can play such a vital role in the current pandemic.

This article was first published by Universities UK

Isolation – Film & TV drama might be best coping mechanisms

Author UWE Bristol media team | Posted on

By Professor Jane Roscoe, Pro Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education

The world is streaming more than ever before as millions of us are living in lockdown and turning to television, films and gaming to fill our time. But immersing ourselves in TV drama and film is not just about relaxing or being entertained by our favourite shows, turning to Netflix or a drama boxset provides us with the opportunity to explore and evaluate our anxieties over the coronavirus and helps us to deal with the challenges of our new reality.

TV drama is the perfect cultural site in which to explore and work out our anxieties over Covid-19. As we are self-isolating, or consciously limiting the time we spend outside of the home, we are left with our fears and anxieties – could screen drama help us?

Television and film have always been a site in which we tell stories about the world around us. Watching and talking about those stories has given us many opportunities to build our own narratives and rehearse our thoughts and ideas. Many have argued our collective memories of key events such as the holocaust, have been in part, built through the screen representations of those events.

Fearful

Facing a pandemic and fast-changing circumstances has made many of us feel anxious, fearful, uncertain and isolated. These feelings are not new, the screen industry has produced a lifetime’s worth of content that explores, exploits and engages us in these very emotions. Importantly, it has also created a safe space in which we can engage in ways that can help us understand the very things that frighten us.

Not surprisingly, many of us have been watching Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011), Outbreak (Petersen, 1995) and Pandemic (Suits, 2016) alongside all the news and documentary productions exploring Covid-19. Documentaries and news provide us with facts, statistics and commentary on what is happening around us, but dramas give us the opportunity to explore how we feel. We are allowed to be scared and horrified as we watch.

While we may have to ‘keep it together’ for our family and friends in our day to day of lockdown life, these moments, when we deeply engage in the narratives of these films, provides the relief of feeling. We also get to see how it might feel to follow through different scenarios. What happens if I get sick? What happens if……

Screen drama is a safe space because it is a site of the imagination, of make believe, magic and the suspension of disbelief. We talk of ‘losing ourselves in a story’, of the ‘dreamlike qualities of a drama’ and often refer to the pleasures escaping into and through a complex narrative. Drama opens up the freedom for producers, actors, and audiences to go deeply into this space, to make sense of the world with no other obligation that to explore the story. In an era of fake news, drama doesn’t need to pretend to be anything other than it is. We are free to explore the narrative, the characters and the scenarios. Perhaps the relief is that we can watch and feel without any obligation to act.

Reinvents world

Screen drama brings the world to us; places, people, events that we may not have experience of, or sometimes, even want. Drama reinvents the world every day, minute by minute, building screen worlds of fantasy and strangeness, alongside those that are more realistic and familiar. Costume dramas create versions of the past allowing us to imagine what was, and science fiction presents versions of our future and the possibility of imaging what could be. Every day, drama is creating a space to imagine aspects of our lives, and those of others in the world around us. Watching these dramas connects us with characters dealing with some of the fears and worries we are also experiencing. That is both a comfort, and the start of a journey to think about how we might cope with those fears. The beauty of these screen dramas is that we can do this in our own space, and at our own pace.

So as we face this new reality of Covid-19, watching those dramas about pandemics, the apocalypse, the end of the world, is not just about judging whether the dramatists got it right or not, but more about allowing us to feel the fear, and use it to help us understand how to get through it.

This article was first published in The London Economic

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