Sharon McCabe
Sharon talks about working at Brookwood as a nurse

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My mum and I fell out and I had nowhere to live. My aunt worked there as a domestic. And basically she got me the application form and I went for an interview and I got the job basically. There was accommodation with it and I think that’s why most people of my age went there.

Basically everything worked around the social club. We used to all go down the social club and they used to have like discos and it was cheap and we didn’t really need to go out of Brookwood. We were just as institutionalised as the patients because we had a shop there and we had a club which was cheaper than what it would be going out so we spent a lot of time inside Brookwood hospital and never really went anywhere else.

I mean we used to, I mean it was work to a routine of course. But we would, you know, we used to do dressings, and bed-bath people and just look after their general needs. It depended on which ward you worked on. I mean I worked on a psycho-geriatric ward which was - there were thirty patients, we had four staff and you had a Sister, and the Sister everybody was terrified of because she wore a blue uniform and she used to stand underneath the clock, and if you were two minutes late she would literally have such a go at you and basically she didn’t do anything on the ward you know, we did all the work as the health care assistants we did all of the work, and she used to sit in the office and when she used to come out she used to say, ‘Tea will now be served.’ We’d have to go and make a tray of tea and we’d sit round the table and we were not allowed to help ourselves until she had done her cup of tea and then we would drink tea.

It was such a busy - I mean busy – schedule. I mean we used to come in like at seven o’clock in the morning and we’d start getting them up at twenty past seven in the morning and we used to have like a trolley with a tap on and there were no such thing as screens - we never used screen in them days because you only had like three staff and this was literally washing them in bed, dressing them and then you’d have to come along, somebody would have to come along and lift them, you know, and put them into the chairs and then you’d go to the next patient and you had a length of time to do that in because say by 9 o’clock the breakfast would then come in on the trolley so everybody would have to be in the dining room and then everybody would be in the dining room and then we’d have to feed them, which I’d say it must have been about 6 or 7 of them out of thirty who could actually feed themselves, and we’d have to feed them. And it was quite hard so you learnt to multi-task very quickly, you know, you literally fed them, you fed two clients at once, basically.