New Rare Document

Early Training Report

The language used in this report may not be considered appropriate today.

Thanks to Michelle Eastwood transcription services we have an easier to read version of a hand written report I received  a year ago. This is an interesting report because the staff were trying something the Hospital system hadn’t tried before and was an interesting experiment which clearly paid dividends both for the”boys and staff”. I have attempted to date this document in a number of ways:

The author mentioned Lachlan Park Hospital (1937-1968)

The names of each of the boys was attached, but for privacy has been removed but are still known to me.

I have a survey dated 1975 in which I have the names and wards of each of the “boys” and their dates of admission and the length of stay at the time of the survey.

I would date this document between 1965-68.

The days routine within a Ward is explained and the issues with overcrowding described in the context of the work that was being attempted. Mostly what is explained here is the success of the hard work of a dedicated team of staff to develop the skills and therefore the Independence of each of the “boys”.

The interesting thing in this document is that the modern skill development guru for people living with an intellectual disability was Dr Marc Gold.

The language used in this film may not be considered appropriate today.

What we see here are a group of people at Lachlan Park Hospital trying what had not been developed as a full theory until the mid to late 1970’s. The mentioned survey above reports that even though this skill development was successful the results report that the “boys” returned to the Wards where skill development wasn’t common.