Lost Hospitals of Brighton and Hove - Softcover

When Britain celebrated the birth of the National Health Service in 1948, there were eleven hospitals in Brighton and Hove. Today only four of them remain. What happened to the seven missing hospitals? Should we mourn their loss? Lost Hospitals of Brighton and Hove examines the part those hospitals played in providing health care to local people during the fifty years before the last of them closed. Thanks to the author s research and the memories of many people who worked in or were treated in them, it s possible to build up a picture of the seven Hospitals Bevendean, Foredown, Hove General, Lady Chichester, New Sussex Hospital for Women, Sussex Maternity and the Sussex Throat and Ear. All seven of these hospitals enjoyed good times. Some had occasional difficult days marked by media and parliamentary criticism. In some the physical conditions were far from satisfactory, the buildings old and decaying. But in all of them the vast majority of staff worked well and compassionately, and most were well-loved by the patients. Little now remains of these hospitals. Many of the buildings have been demolished. Some now house flats and apartments; a couple serve other health purposes although none, like some of those in London, are now the sites of supermarkets or even prisons. Lost Hospitals of Brighton and Hove tells the stories of these seven hospitals, the patients and the staff who worked in them stories that cry out to be told before memories fade and they are lost for ever.

The author is a former senior hospital administrator working in Brighton and Mid Sussex. He edited the hospitals national award winning house journal for forty years. This is the sixth local hospital history he has written and published during the past ten years. It is again being sold in aid of the Friends of Brighton and Hove Hospitals, the charity the supports health care provision in the city and in Peacehaven and Newhaven.