Nurse's plea to end 'impersonal' property bags
Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS TrustAn end-of-life nurse is asking keen sewers to make bags after she had to bring her mum's belongings home from hospital in a plastic bag following her death.
Debbie Williams, who works for Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Trust, said bringing her mum's things home in the bag was "impersonal and clinical", and does not want other bereaved people to experience the same.
In 2022, Williams helped the trust launch an appeal to create a bank of fabric property bags but while they have received "lots and lots" over the years, she said stock is running low.
"No-one should have to carry their relative's property home in a plastic bag, so I'm making it a mission that it won't happen," Williams said.
Prior to the first appeal for property bags in 2022, a spokesperson for Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Trust said it had used "whatever was to hand".
"The NHS issue property bags are generally white with property patient's property written across, or green, as was from a personal experience many years ago," Williams said.
"At a time when patients have died, it just feels very impersonal and a lack of dignity."
Often patients have their own bags in hospital but they end up accumulating "all sorts of things" between going into hospital and dying, Debbie said.
Williams brought the idea to the NHS from her old workplace, where a volunteer sewing group had created the bags, and said the feedback from families had been "really positive".
'Dignified and respectful'
The bags, which the trust posted the pattern of on its Facebook page, are 24in by 24in (63cm x 63cm).
They are distributed among Gloucestershire's community hospitals and are commonly made of curtains, as they are thicker than things like duvet covers.
"I'm not a sewer, which was probably the bane of my mum's life because she was a sewer, but I'm told it's a very easy pattern," Williams said.
A spokesperson for the trust said plastic bags had not been used since 2022 "thanks to the great public response to the first appeal".
"We're extremely grateful that [the public's] generosity allows us a dignified and respectful means of giving possessions back to families."
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