Chit Chat
Louisa Jordan is one of Scotland's treasured nurses.
Her career was brief, cut short at age 36 - her final post was tending to wounded soldiers in Serbia in 1915, during the height of a typhus outbreak.
The people of Serbia gather each year to commemorate her courage and sacrifice, as well as that of her colleagues.
Now she will be honoured in her home city, as a temporary hospital designed to fight the coronavirus will be named NHS Louisa Jordan.
A similar facility in London has been named after Florence Nightingale.
She said: "She is a person who has perhaps up until now been better remembered in Serbia than in Scotland. This hospital is a fitting tribute to her service and her courage."
Sister Jordan was born in Maryhill, Glasgow in 1878 - 50 years before the invention of the ventilator.
Her nursing experience was varied, and worked at the Shotts Fever Hospital in Lanarkshire and at the poor law hospital in Manchester before joining the war effort.
In December 1914 she signed up with the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Services while working as a Queen's nurse in Buckhaven, Fife.
During the Serbian epidemic, which is estimated to have claimed 150,000 lives in six months, Sister Jordan was in charge of a new fever ward at the SWH unit in Kragujevac.
Many doctors died and others were too sick to treat patients.
Spread by mites, lice or fleas, typhus thrives in filthy, overcrowded conditions - though is now treatable if discovered quickly.
While nursing one of her colleagues, Sister Jordan kept a diary and recorded that "hardly a day passes but there is one or two funerals here".
She died from typhus a few days later aged 36.
Her name, alongside several others, is inscribed on an organ in Wilton Parish Church in Glasgow - remembering members of the congregation who gave their lives during World War One.
She is also commemorated on the Buckhaven War Memorial.
The facility was built in around 18 days in exhibition halls at the Scottish Events Campus in Glasgow, and will initially offer 300 beds with the potential to expand capacity to 1,036 beds.
Although the majority of emergency coronavirus hospitals in the UK are named after Florence Nightingale, a pioneer of professional nursing who ran field hospitals in the Crimean War, the Scottish site is named after a nurse who died treating troops in Serbia in 1915, during a typhus outbreak.
Its completion comes amid growing confidence the facility will not be needed as the number of critical cases in Scotland shows signs of plateauing.
Although weekend data does not cover all fatalities, it emerged yesterday that 10 more people had died in hospital in Scotland from Covid-19, bringing the death toll to 903.
There has been a further drop in the numbers being treated in intensive care, down by eight, to a total yesterday of 174. In all, 1,797 people are in Scottish hospital with confirmed or suspected Covid-19, a rise of four.
I couldn't care or infact see the need to name this new temporary facility, total waste off time. It's the hospital end off.
Apr 20, 2020 -- 10:05AM, Angoose wrote:
Scotland’s emergency hospital for Covid-19 patients, the NHS Louisa Jordan, will be ready to receive patients from today after construction on the £43m facility was finished.The facility was built in around 18 days in exhibition halls at the Scottish Events Campus in Glasgow, and will initially offer 300 beds with the potential to expand capacity to 1,036 beds.Although the majority of emergency coronavirus hospitals in the UK are named after Florence Nightingale, a pioneer of professional nursing who ran field hospitals in the Crimean War, the Scottish site is named after a nurse who died treating troops in Serbia in 1915, during a typhus outbreak.Its completion comes amid growing confidence the facility will not be needed as the number of critical cases in Scotland shows signs of plateauing.Although weekend data does not cover all fatalities, it emerged yesterday that 10 more people had died in hospital in Scotland from Covid-19, bringing the death toll to 903.There has been a further drop in the numbers being treated in intensive care, down by eight, to a total yesterday of 174. In all, 1,797 people are in Scottish hospital with confirmed or suspected Covid-19, a rise of four.
Surely it should be called the ICU Jimmy
