There are certain stories in life that follow a pattern: local thing gets made, local thing leaves, local thing becomes famous somewhere else, and everyone back home says they always knew it would do well. This week it is the turn of Out-of-Hospital Newborn Life Support training, which is finally coming home to Swindon in October.
Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will run the first Swindon-based OHNLS courses this month, during Restart a Heart Month, after the programme was originally developed and piloted in the town before being adopted nationally. Dr Sarah Bates, a neonatal consultant at Great Western Hospitals, said it was a proud moment to see something that started in Swindon become a nationally recognised course, and to welcome instructors from across the country to deliver it here. Naomi Phillips, a community midwife and the first in the UK to be selected as an OHNLS instructor, said the training had never been more needed, as more women choose to give birth outside hospital, and that it builds confidence and consistency for the professionals who attend to them in ambulances, at home births and other community settings. After the course was presented nationally in 2019 it won an award and was taken up by the Resuscitation Council UK, with the Welsh Ambulance Service reporting dramatic improvements in newborn temperature monitoring and warming equipment use in its first year.
What nobody seems to have mentioned is how extraordinarily like a reunion tour this is. The thing left Swindon quietly, did very well for itself touring Wales and beyond, picked up an award, and is now coming back to play the room where it started, presumably to rapturous applause from people who remember when it was starting out.
It is understood that nobody has yet proposed a blue plaque, but give it time. Swindon has form here. The Magic Roundabout confuses visitors nationally and we barely mention it. The steam railway built half the industrial world and we put it in a museum. At this rate the town's official motto should be 'invented here, perfected elsewhere, returning for one night only'.
I will admit a personal interest. When our eldest arrived, the general approach in the room could charitably be described as 'confident improvisation', and I would have paid good money for anyone involved to have done a structured course beforehand. Standardised training, in an ambulance or a front room, with proper kit for keeping a newborn warm, is not a small thing. It is, frankly, the opposite of a gimmick, which makes the hometown-homecoming framing feel almost rude, but here we are.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, was unmoved by the fanfare. 'In my day it was a towel, a kettle on for later, and Ron waiting outside with his pipe,' she said. 'Nobody needed a faculty. Mind you, nobody had a mattress that keeps a baby's temperature right either, so I'll give them that one.'
A council spokesperson, when asked whether Swindon might start branding itself 'birthplace of things that leave and do well', declined to comment, which Brenda said was probably for the best, as the last time somebody got a certificate for something local it was a hanging basket.