Jimmy Savile can fix it

My campaign to cheer up waiting rooms reminds me of the good work of Jimmy Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital

Jimmy Savile (Picture by JMB - CC licence)

TO recap, I'm campaigning for cheerier waiting rooms. I'd settle for just one waiting room in West Cumbria being transformed into somewhere it is actually nice to sit and wait. Having surfed the web, it's clear that there are no decent waiting rooms anywhere in the world - they are all identically bad. But I suspect Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire has a nice one. I worked near there in the 1980s when it was having a revamp. Celebrity Jimmy Savile was brought onto the planning board - thank goodness. He said from the outset that the last thing it should look like is a hospital - and he insisted that the word "Welcome" should be written above the door. Imagine that. A hospital that says Welcome. What if West Cumberland's A&E dept did away with its 38 posters warning you of death and horror, opting instead for just a one-word sign: Welcome.

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