We’ve had a busy period of activity on the accessions front, with a mixture of large and small accessions arriving from the NHS and from private hands. Here’s a selection of those related to psychiatry and mental health.
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| Design for Young People's Unit, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, 1967 |
A fantastic set of designs for the Royal Edinburgh Hospital was received as part of the bicentenary archive appeal. Created by interior designer Margaret Campbell in 1967, they include proposals for MacKinnon House, the Young People’s Unit, and the Doctors’ Residence. They are a celebration of 1960s fashions, and include test fabrics, colour blocks, slides and drawings. Our thanks go to Margaret for kindly donating her work to LHSA – we expect it will prove to be a great resource for anyone studying hospital design during this period.
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| Design for North Wing, MacKinnon House, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, 1967 |
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| Detail of design, Royal Edinburgh Hospital, 1967 |
Last week, the Oor Mad History papers were transferred to the Archive to join the oral history recordings collected earlier on in the project. Together, they form a comprehensive record of the mental health service user movement in Edinburgh and the Lothians from the 1980s onwards, and we look forward to this being a heavily used collection.
And finally, today, the Archivist will be sampling late-twentieth century psychiatric case notes from West Lothian. These records are considered likely to have long term archival value, but given the huge quantity of them, a random sample will be selected for transfer to the Archive whilst the remainder will be securely destroyed by the NHS Lothian Records Management team, since they are beyond their legal retention period and have no further administrative or clinical value. More information on this can be found in Annex B of the NHS Records Management Code of Practice can be found at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2012/01/10143104/0.
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