Medical Monday: Blunt Sharps

I really enjoy making model railway stuff, and gluing together kits for tanks or futuristic fighter planes from Gerry Anderson shows.

I also have three kids and a mortgage, and a desire for me and the wife, and said youths, to sleep indoors and eat hot food. To which end, because all the fun Toy Train business is lovely but doesn't pay a lot, I have a Proper Job.

Having worked in the catering sector (waiter up to manager), a Lead Exams Invigilator, and as a Product Design Technician, and more, I've ended up for the last few years as a Medical Education Technician at a major Northern Teaching Hospital, for that most wonderful and head-desking of British institutions, the NHS. 

It's a weird old job, which can vary between being a butcher of sheep carcases for Chest Drain training one day, to driving high-tech simulated robot patients the next. And every now and then, I can shoe-horn my skills and talents for miniatures or model-making into the job. So I figure I might as well share some of it on here, as beyond my immediate colleagues at the job, nobody really sees the behind the scenes work that goes into this malarkey.

I'm aware though it might not be everybody's cup of tea, especially if you're here normally for the toy trains or futuristic APC's, so...

...still here? Jolly good, I'll crack on.

(There'll be one of these trigger warnings for each of the posts on this subject, just to be on the safe side. This month is rather tame, and I won't be posting any of the really grim or grotty stuff I do, but all the same, I know sometimes the medical stuff can be affecting to people, so please feel free to stroll away if you think it'll be upsetting.)

One of the courses we regularly run is "Managing Patients Who Pose A Risk", a training course for all grades of staff from Cleaners to Nurses, Porters to Consultants. We have our mocked-up ward, and we have faculty who re-create and simulate 'challenging' situations that have happened, and how staff can both diffuse it, and protect themselves. Previously, for instances where patients have armed themselves, we've used cardboard cut-outs and the like.

It's always annoyed me a bit, as the medical faculty put their hearts and souls into their teaching aspect of the sessions, and consequently I've set myself a bit of a mission to raise the fidelity of the Simulations from the aspects of it we support.

We have disposable scalpels for some of the meaty stuff up in the Lab, so I salvaged a few, removed the blades, and thoroughly cleaned it all up.

1mm acrylic, slightly flexible, and carefully filed to remove the sharp edges or points. I also cut-off and re-mounted the blade securing lug.

Three different scalpels, based on commonly-used blades (I used the real thing as a template).

Spray-undercoated, then brushed with metallic Citadel acrylics. I deliberately went for a gunmetal shade rather than bright silver, just so I could differentiate these from the real deal at a glance.

I also wanted some fake scissors, and so used some of these disposable clamps. They're not good enough for our regular use, so they've been kicking around a drawer since I joined the job.

More acrylic, and painted up to broadly resemble DeBakey Forceps with the two-tone shades, but again, in a darker tone to allow me to not mix them up at a glance.

So that's the medical stuff that a patient might nick and arm themselves with, either to threaten their own health, a fellow patient, or staff member. But we also needed weapons smuggled into the wards or building. After watching some slightly terrifying American Health Service videos about disarming patients armed with the kinds of weapons the General Infantry carry (you know, in case all those deer and things the Yanks are hunting are riding around Wyoming in armoured cars), I set my sights on something slightly more realistic to a British hospital, and a small, easily concealed knife.

Being as I didn't have a budget for this project (because NHS), I was looking for what we artists call 'found objects' (or tat, if you will), to repurpose.

These are plug-in supports which separated the two levels of a set of vintage filing trays. Said trays will turn up in a later post, having been repurposed in turn for another project.

Same acrylic for the blade as used in the scalpels.

And thus, a passable kitchen knife.

Another thing we needed was patients 'self medicating'. A rare, but bloody vexing problem. I started by  simulating a little bag or two of white powder (flour and crushed sea-salt... and that, Constable, is all I will be saying on the matter until my Solicitor arrives). I then turned to the syringe boxes; honestly, we have hundreds of these, as we re-use every damned thing we can lay our hands on.

How to do the needles raised a few issues. Having looked at blunt sewing needles, I found some plastic rods in a box which have tapered, but blunt ends. No idea what they're for- they're probably for a particular kind of surgery, and no doubt cost about £160 each on Supply Chain.

Fluid inside from hot glue, which was squirted in, then the whole lot was bunged in a freezer to set.  One of these will have a plastic protective cover re-fitted to the needle too.

And that's that, for this post- some more stuff will be made once these have been shown to the faculty, and there'll be some bits in another post too.  Maybe something slightly more medical-themed for the next one. Hopefully this will have been of interest, if a bit different from my usual fare on here.

 

We went to the Settle Model Railway Show

I haven't been able to go to many model railway exhibitions this year, but then I found out that Warners, publishers of both Garden Rail and British Railway Modelling, were sponsoring a show up in Settle. And like the bought-and-paid-for company people we are, Amy and I thought we'd best go up there (not least because some of the models for the next batch of BRM practical pieces would need to be collected off the magazines stand). A trip on a soon to be extinct class 158 deposited us, and quite a number of visitors, in the Dales market town. The train had been quite busy, it was almost like Northern should put longer, and more regular, trains on this main line... 

The exhibition was a curious one; spread throughout the town, and free to enter all the venues, with eatery options and live music. Typically after weeks of hot weather, it was due to go extremely manky (technical term) that day, but it was merely threatening when we arrived.

The first lot of venues were in the station yard, with a mix of trade and layouts. A lovely bit of TT:120, tempting me very much towards making something in this scale.

Oooh, it's like being in an episode of Grand Designs.

Over to the Victoria Hall (after a lovely brunch at the Naked Man Cafe), where amongst a bit of trade from the likes of Ellis Clarke, and Sheffield Trains, there were some more layouts.

How many points for All The Yellow Trains?

I'll be honest; I didn't get many model shots. Not because the models were boring or poor, far from it. But the individual venues hosting them were small, crowded, and because of the weather, a bit stuffy. I was hard to get decent shots or angles.

A rather impressive test track, with Ribblehead viaduct.

This model is a good opportunity to mention that most of the layouts on show made heavy use of digital technology; some, like this one, were more about the operation by computer than the layout. To be honest that sort of thing left me a little cold, which is a personal thing. I spend almost every day at work operating and maintaining advanced robotics and digital technology, and rather like my model-making analogue. At some point I'll need to embrace the future (well, present), but for now I'm dodging it where I can.

Back onto the station.

We had 20 mins to kill before the train back down the valley (which, because of the frankly stupid timetable Northern insist on, we had to get to avoid a further three hour wait. On an Anglo-Scottish main line!). Luckily the preserved signal box was open.

This might look like a random, arty shot, but there's method in the madness, as it informs an upcoming project for Garden Rail that me and Amy are doing at the moment.

It's traditional, I gather, to post pictures showing off the swag acquired at these exhibitions, and the hundreds of pounds spent on the latest Bachmann locomotives. Working to something of a budget however due to various real-life reasons, we could stretch to a free kit from Metcalfeshire...

...and a dog-eared reproductive copy of the Hornby Book of Trains, because my Techo Fear means I'm more interested in clockwork and tinplate at the moment. Still, it was a few quid for the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Railway Society, so a worthy cause.

All in all, a slightly odd exhibition. Scattered as it was throughout the town, meant it was a bit different to any exhibition I'd been too before, and the muggy, close atmosphere of the day made it a bit stuffy in some of the venues (combined with the heavy rain of the afternoon). That said, it was friendly and welcoming, and it was something a bit different. It will be interesting to see how it develops in the future.

 

BRM Magazine; Station Top 10

So, I can finally put up on here some good news that came my way in the Spring- a regular run of articles in British Railway Modelling! Since Feb, when I was asked to do a little selection of projects, I've been quietly beavering away on a rather varied selection of model-making for them, and the first one is now on the shelves.

The first article is a Top 10 piece on railway stations, and the features to be spotted on preserved lines.

To be honest, it ended up turning practically into an advertising feature for the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, with about half the shots taken there, but given I love the line, no bad thing.

Having photographed lots of the features around railways (including these nice new bins), I wanted to build a photography set for the header of the article. You know, some actual model making here on the model making blog. Shocking.

When I started these projects, the idea was to have everything designed to fit inside a shoebox-sized Really Useful Box, on a roughly A4-sized board. Mission creep being what it is of course, only one of the four builds ended up fulfilling this criteria, but hey-ho.

I'd originally designed this one to fold in half, so I'd have a nice long board for the photographs.

I had to break off a bit from the project though to finish some stuff for Hornby, and do the boring old Day Job, then with limited time left when I restarted it all, I realised that I needed to speed up completion for this particular BRM build if I was going to manage a fancy location shoot whilst we were in Wales. The overcomplicated hinged board idea went out the window, in favour of a more basic board, this time in a Wrapping Paper Box. Still small enough to carry out to location, but no faffing with bolts, hinges, and wing-nuts.

I wanted to create a sort of scene that a beginner could do on a budget, so had a hunt around bargain bins and second-hand stalls in model shops for the bits and pieces to include.

Packing foam hillsides and scenery, Dapol platform, Hornby bridge and halt.

The bridge was undercoated then drybrushed with various shades.

The station building needed to be small and simple; the Hornby Halt is one of my favourites. This one was an absolute bargain in one of the regular sales Hornby have, in fact I think with my loyalty points I might not have even needed to pay more than a couple of quid for this.

A quick repaint with Humbrol and Citadel acrylics, then weathering with Citadel Nuln Oil.

The board was finished in time for shooting some pics whilst up in Wales. The other models I built for BRM were mostly shot at home with an A1 backdrop, but this layout was a little too big for that.

The greenery was a right mix, some surprisingly good quality trees in bulk bought online, and a dive into the box of odds and ends of scatters, static grass, and hedges.

I needed a hillside where I could get a nice sky in shot, so went up into a spot I used to use a lot, just outside upper Penrhyndeudraeth. It's been the background for a few shoots in recent years, everything from Airfix Quick-Build cars to Captain Scarlet aircraft, to garden-scale trains.

Full-sized train passing the shoot location, Merddin Emrys trundling past on the way to Porthmadog.

Oooh look! On the cover!

And in the mag- very nice, and very much appreciated that they wanted me for the mag.

*

A bit of a bonus; a build by Amy, my wife, to help with the project.

One of the features of the project I'd photographed, and wanted to represent on the model, was a playground. We know (from the experience of our three) that two of the best are Oxenhope...

...and Tanybwlch.

Amy wanted a go at doing some kits, and Metcalfe kits fitted the bill nicely.

Quality laser-cut kits, as usual by our experience with them.

And installed on the model; all it needs is some giddy kiddies hurling themselves down the slides with a wanton disregard for the possibility of broken legs and arms (again, from experience...)