Oral History Gallery

Equipment at sea 5 - Improvisation of equipment on SS Uganda, 1982

Julia Massey

Service: 1968 - 1996

Rate: Captain

Julia joined the QARNNS (Queen Alexandra Royal Naval Nursing Service) in 1968 and worked at Royal Naval Hospital Haslar, a number of medical facilities in Malta, RNH Plymouth, HMS Pembroke and RNH Hong Kong. In 1982, she was part of the nursing team embarked on SS Uganda for the Falklands War and during the Gulf War she was responsible for allocating nurses to RFA Argus. In 1994 she was involved with the Defence Cost Studies Report which led to the closure of the RN Hospitals, the establishment of tri-service training and the reduction of the QARNNS by nearly a half.

Find out more about some of the ways nursing staff improvised equipment on SS Uganda during the Falklands War.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Extract Text (Duration 1.39)

The wards had no curtains or no privacy for the patients at all, and certainly in the two main... the intensive care and the ward I was in, the patients were bed bound. I mean for chaps it's quite easy ‘cause they've got bottles so that's easier than for women, but there's an awful lot of use of bedpans in the middle of the night. But I think being servicemen they...they get on with it, civilians wouldn't have coped in the same way. Course we didn't have our lovely bedpan washers and things that we have in hospitals, and in this ward where I was in, there were two loos and P&O set up for us this rather Heath Robinson contraption of they ... they went into the piped water supply and they set up this big sort of hose and we just had to sort of hose the bedpans out. We were given... we had great big rubber gloves, I mean, you know, this is what one has to do. Yeah, over quite a lot of things we compromised. The one thing we had not got with us was weights for traction, for orthopaedic traction, and so we filled plastic sort of lemonade bottles with water and we could weigh them and we could know how much weight is, so these things all hung at the ends of beds instead of weights. There was usually a way round everything.