Big Developments At Templeton Hospital

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29107, 20 January 1960, Page 12

Big Developments At Templeton Hospital

Development of the Templeton Hospital and Training School as the South Island institution for lower grade intellectually-handi-capped children is being pushed ahead at a fast rate.

Recently-completed and immediately planned work involves expenditure of more than £1 million.

Three new 48-patient villas have been opened recently and a start has been made on a centralised area to be devoted to administration, recreation and specialised training to cater for a future psychiatric population of 750 inmates. A recreation hall and canteen combined, and a store and male attendants’ quarters have sprung up in the last few months.

The hall was used for the first time last month (it is an innovation in psychiatric care in New Zealand and will be copied at Cherry Farm. Dunedin, and Levin); the huge store is to come into full use before the end of January. Among its few contents yesterday morning were four dozen chests of tea. “Three months’ supply,” commented the head attendant at the hospital (Mr H. D. Bell) during an inspection. There is also a telephone exchange awaiting connexion and echoing offices with their receivers resting on concrete floors. When the store comes into use it will cater for the full range of the hospital’s needs —clothing, rations, furniture and furnishings, engineering and cooking equipment and so on.

At present, stores are Issued direct from the Sunnyside Psychiatric Hospital’s main store, which will be given much-needed relief when Templeton takes over. Community Centre The amenities and facilities for recreation —an important part of the treatment of patients—will make the new hall a community centre for the hospital. .There are a full-size projection box, dressing-rooms for artists behind a stage (both visiting players and the patients produce concerts) and a cellar for seats and props (the hall will hold about 580 persons). Dancing for patients will be popular this winter and the boys have their own 20-piece band to accompany it. The band comprises mouth-organs, piano - accordion, tissue paper and combs, a banjo, trumpet and drums. The bandmaster is Mr J. White —who trumpeted with British dance bands —and in his opinion the group is remarkably good, not relatively but absolutely. “They are strict tempo, loads of percussion and all want to play solo,” he says. “Many are cripples and it is about all they can do.” The boys all play by ear and pick up the tunes rapidly from the numerous radios round the hospital. Music is considered by the hospital staff to be one of the best therapies available and the elder children and adults tune the radios to lisen to it as much as they can. “They are up with all the hit tunes before the rest of us,” says the matron (Miss S. M. O’Keefe). New Buildings

More buildings are to go up in the central area, which is about the middle of low, sprawling villas, strung over a mile and a quarter. There will be a hairdressing salon associated with a sewing room block and a dental clinic in the occupational therapy block.

At present, the Sunnyside dentist cares for the patients’ teeth. Also planned are a garage, workshops, butchery, bakehouse, and chapel, and more villas. Two residences for medical staff are about to be started.

The first building completed in the central core scheme was a tiny training school; but the intellect of the patients means that it is useful only to about one in 10 at present. Yet learning the alphabet and to tell the time; modelling and clipping and pasting and other handwork is all being used wherever possible to stretch a child.’s mental capacity to its limit, even if it is only to teach him to dress himself, wash, and behave properly at a meal table.

The “extras,” such as tools, pictures, . knitting wool, and needles, embroidery silks and patterns, are in constant demand.

Patients* Help The superintendent (Dr. J. D. Hunter) says that about a third of the hospital’s 560 patients are cripples, and the proportion is rising. Handicapped as they are, the remainder nevertheless are extremely useful in helping to run the establishment that cares for them. They cook, sew, and garden, farm, repair, and launder. Mr H. Ellwood has six patients and conducts an upholstery and woodwork shop that makes all the mattresses and pillows for the hospital, from teasing out the kapoc by machine to the finished article. This shop also reconditions furniture, replaces old flock

with foam rubber, and recovers sofas and chairs and repairs and makes horse and cow covers.

Templeton cares for and supplies animal covers for all Health Department institutions in New Zealand; yesterday morning there was a big pile in from Hanmer Springs to be repaired. In another shop, Mr G. Asher has seven boys working full time repairing boots and shoes. “They don’t do what they do not want to, and they really enjoy it,” says the matron. Learning by Games

This philosophy is carried into practice in the park-like playground. Near see-saws, swings, a slide, a maypole, and a merry-go-round are gymnastic-style bars set in the lawn. “They are to teach kiddies to walk by hanging on. When you learn it as a game it is much easier than when it is forced on you,” says Dr. Hunter. Not only buildings are part of Templeton's expansion. A new sewerage scheme to cater exclusively for the hospital came into operation last year and at present roading, grassing and reticulation of water and electricity is going on to the development plan drawn up by the Ministry of Works.

Electricity is generally underground and the overhead wiring there will later be made subterranean. Workmen are at present installing water sprinkler systems for fire in the older type buildings (the first of which was occupied in August, 1959).