![\"\"](\"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/ely-hospital-93839729-300x169.jpg\" "\\"ely-hospital-93839729\\"")
<\/a>A busy social scene at Ely Hospital<\/p><\/div>\n
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Former patients and staff have come together to tell the inside story of Ely Hospital for a new exhibition at the Cardiff Story museum. Clare Hutchinson takes a look at day-to-day life at the institution, as told by those who were there<\/strong><\/p>\nIN the late 1960s Ely Hospital, a long-stay hospital for people with learning difficulties, was an isolated world in which cigarettes were the only currency and patients slept 50 to a ward.<\/p>\n
This all changed after the 1969 Ely Inquiry \u2013 with ward sizes going down to 30 patients or less \u2013 but many of the characteristics of life in the institution remained the same.<\/p>\n
Karen Jeffreys of Cardiff People First said: \u201cThey didn\u2019t get a choice. They got up when they were told to get up, they wore what they were told to wear, ate what they were told to eat and did activities that they were told to do.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor many people, we are talking about 30 years of their lives \u2013 or more \u2013 without even being able to make a cup of tea for themselves, because the kettle was an industrial one and it was too dangerous.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t just in Ely \u2013 this was happening in institutions like it across the country. It was just the way things were done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because patients did not earn money, cigarettes became a form of currency in the hospital \u2013 something recounted by a former therapist.\u201cYou had a lot of members of staff who used to smoke on the wards,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess as people became more enlightened they used to include the residents. So they would get the residents to do something, like, \u2018if you go down the shop to get me my Chinese meal I\u2019ll give you a cigarette\u2019, and once the person becomes hooked it becomes more of an incentive to get more cigarettes.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome residents would smoke continuously, while others would pick them up off the floor and make up their own, or some used to eat them.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut because some of them tended to smoke them very quickly, by the end of the week they wouldn\u2019t have any, so what some of the staff would do was to share them out throughout the week to ensure the person would have cigarettes, because if they didn\u2019t they would become very agitated, very angry, and then it would be almost triggering people to go and pinch them \u2013 and of course they would get into trouble and all sorts of things.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it made sense. With the staff it was a sense of control over people. You control the supply and the currency and you can have more influence over what people did.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cBehaviour modification is a good therapeutic tool but then it was used as, \u2018if you\u2019re a bad boy or a bad girl\u2019 \u2013 and we\u2019re talking about men and women the same age or older than me \u2013 their cigarettes were taken off them, or they couldn\u2019t see their mum or their dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
One former patient recalled his own experience of going to the shop across the road to buy cigarettes.\u201cI told the day nurse can I go over the shop and she told me \u2018What are you going over the shop for?\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told her I wanted a packet of cigarettes and she went to the office to get the money out, gave it to me and then she told me, \u2018After you\u2019ve got your cigarettes go straight back to the hospital.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cYou couldn\u2019t have a cigarette on the ward, you had to go outside. But you couldn\u2019t go out through the gates, you had to stay on the premises.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Looking back at Ely Hospital: Staff ruled every aspect of life http:\/\/www.walesonline.co.uk\/cardiffonline\/cardiff-news\/2012\/01\/24\/ely-hospital-staff-ruled-every-aspect-of-life-91466-30187831\/ Former patients and staff have come together to tell the inside story of Ely Hospital for a new exhibition at the Cardiff Story museum. Clare Hutchinson takes a look at day-to-day life at the institution, as told by those who were there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,77],"tags":[88,4],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ely-hospital","category-news","tag-ely-hospital","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":946,"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whitchurchhospital.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}