Lottery funding and community partnerships: the Bethnal Green Disaster Memorial Project

This session will focus on building effective partnerships with small charities and organisations who can benefit from partnering with the university in funding bids. We will use a recent (successful) 93K bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund as a case study, explaining how the bid developed from an approach from a small charity to give some multimedia advice for a new memorial site to working up a small 10K lottery bid, which was then scrapped and re-written into a 93K HLF application. We will go on to discuss the early phase of the project itself, an 18 month project interpreting the history of the 1943 Bethnal Green Disaster and its memorialisation, and consider the difficulties and importance of maintaining good partnerships in the project delivery. Finally we will outline some new funding programmes that have started at the Heritage Lottery Fund which may be of interest to others working in the community development or heritage field. The presentation will be given by the project director, Dr Toby Butler and the project manager, Dr Amy Murphy. Full information about the project is here http://www.raphael-samuel.org.uk/bethnal-green-disaster-memorial-project-0 or see BBC news coverage of the Bethnal Green Disaster anniversary events which features some commentary from the project director

Reading the lives between the lines: lesbian literature and oral history in post-war Britain

In existing scholarship of twentieth-century British lesbian history the post-war period has been largely overlooked. Whereas the interwar period and the 1970s and 1980s have garnered much critical interest as crucial loci of lesbian identity formation, the post-war period has been obscured between the two. What work does exist has focused almost exclusively on the creation of lesbian public spaces and lesbian communities. This has been to the exclusion of research into lesbian home and private life, and has also served to obscure experiences of closeted or isolated women. The critical focus on the interwar period in particular has also been facilitated and corroborated by lesbian literary studies, which has used the modernist movement as the backbone for the creation of a lesbian literary canon. This has been to the obscuration of lesbian literature of the post-war period. Furthermore, this academic bias has overlooked the significance of the cultural value of such literature by failing to acknowledge or investigate what lesbians in post-war Britain were actually reading. This thesis positions itself at the intersection of these research gaps. Employing an interdisciplinary approach this project argues for the greater inclusion of post-war literature and post-war lesbian lives in scholarly investigation. Through close textual analysis of a range of post-war lesbian literature and oral history interviews conducted by the author, this thesis presents insights into the minutiae of lesbian life and into the roots of lesbian identity formation within this period. To situate itself within existing historiography this thesis takes as its starting point the lesbian magazine, Arena Three (1964-71), undertaking an analysis of the magazine’s book review column in order to build a picture of the post-war lesbian reader. Following on from this, close textual analyses of lesbian pulp fiction and original oral history transcripts are used to assess representations of domesticity. Specifically the concepts of hetero-domesticity and homo-domesticity are developed and employed to investigate lesbian identities as they existed within both heterosexual and same-sex relationships. Graham Dawson’s oral history theory of ‘composure’ is used to examine how lesbian narrators are successful or unsuccessful in incorporating experiences of hetero-domesticity into wider lesbian narratives. This framework is similarly employed to investigate the ways in which homo-domestic experiences can assist lesbian narrators to achieve composure. Lastly oral history reminiscences of reading in the post-war period are analysed in order to assess the role that literature played, both in lesbian identity formation and in facilitating narrators’ journeys into wider lesbian social worlds

Postoperative continuous positive airway pressure to prevent pneumonia, re-intubation, and death after major abdominal surgery (PRISM): a multicentre, open-label, randomised, phase 3 trial

Background: Respiratory complications are an important cause of postoperative morbidity. We aimed to investigate whether continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) administered immediately after major abdominal surgery could prevent postoperative morbidity. Methods: PRISM was an open-label, randomised, phase 3 trial done at 70 hospitals across six countries. Patients aged 50 years or older who were undergoing elective major open abdominal surgery were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive CPAP within 4 h of the end of surgery or usual postoperative care. Patients were randomly assigned using a computer-generated minimisation algorithm with inbuilt concealment. The primary outcome was a composite of pneumonia, endotracheal re-intubation, or death within 30 days after randomisation, assessed in the intention-to-treat population. Safety was assessed in all patients who received CPAP. The trial is registered with the ISRCTN registry, ISRCTN56012545. Findings: Between Feb 8, 2016, and Nov 11, 2019, 4806 patients were randomly assigned (2405 to the CPAP group and 2401 to the usual care group), of whom 4793 were included in the primary analysis (2396 in the CPAP group and 2397 in the usual care group). 195 (8\ub71%) of 2396 patients in the CPAP group and 197 (8\ub72%) of 2397 patients in the usual care group met the composite primary outcome (adjusted odds ratio 1\ub701 [95% CI 0\ub781-1\ub724]; p=0\ub795). 200 (8\ub79%) of 2241 patients in the CPAP group had adverse events. The most common adverse events were claustrophobia (78 [3\ub75%] of 2241 patients), oronasal dryness (43 [1\ub79%]), excessive air leak (36 [1\ub76%]), vomiting (26 [1\ub72%]), and pain (24 [1\ub71%]). There were two serious adverse events: one patient had significant hearing loss and one patient had obstruction of their venous catheter caused by a CPAP hood, which resulted in transient haemodynamic instability. Interpretation: In this large clinical effectiveness trial, CPAP did not reduce the incidence of pneumonia, endotracheal re-intubation, or death after major abdominal surgery. Although CPAP has an important role in the treatment of respiratory failure after surgery, routine use of prophylactic post-operative CPAP is not recommended