Heart of the Nation: Migration and the Making of the NHS Exhibition

A new exhibition at Trinity Leeds highlights the vital role played by migrants in the NHS.

Transcript

00:00 Hi there, my name is Matt Plowright, I'm part of the team at the Migration Museum.

00:04 Our exhibition 'Heart of the Nation, Migration and the Making of the NHS'

00:09 is on until the 18th of February at our new pop-up museum in Trinity, Leeds.

00:14 And it tells the story of people from all around the world who have come to Britain

00:19 to create, shape and sustain the NHS at all levels.

00:24 So we actually first started working on this exhibition during the Covid pandemic

00:30 and we put it together initially into a digital exhibition that we launched in 2020.

00:34 This year is the 75th anniversary year of the NHS

00:38 and so to mark the 75th anniversary year we've created this national touring exhibition.

00:44 The whole point of the museum is to make people feel heard,

00:47 so it's quite nice to, when people visit, to also ask them about their stories

00:52 and make sure they feel heard like the people that we're showcasing here.

00:56 We've got stories of NHS workers past and present from all around the world

01:00 working all across the country,

01:02 but we've also collected a number of stories of Leeds-based NHS workers as well.

01:09 When I first came in I was really sort of invited in by how

01:15 there's sort of a path that you can take round.

01:17 We've already had a lot of family members of the people that are featured come in

01:21 and just to see the excitement on their faces of seeing,

01:24 reading through the stories, even of their own family,

01:28 is really fantastic and it just shows that what we're doing

01:32 is serving the purpose that we're trying to serve of making people just feel appreciated.

01:38 On the left we have a nurse's uniform that was lent to us by a nurse called Henadina Gadong

01:46 who's originally from the Philippines and moved to Britain in the 1970s.

01:50 So this was a professional uniform and actually the story she tells is that one of her colleagues,

01:56 when she first qualified and wore her uniform,

02:00 was really affronted by the fact that she was wearing the same uniform,

02:04 said that you haven't done the same training, you're not as qualified.

02:08 Obviously Henadina was highly qualified and was a nurse in the same way

02:12 and so it was both a story of a challenge, a difficulty encountered,

02:16 and that's important too, we don't want this exhibition isn't all

02:19 just about celebrating stories but also about acknowledging the challenges and difficulties.

02:23 We're building this ongoing national archive of migration stories and we'd love,

02:30 you know, Leeds and Yorkshire stories to be heavily represented in that.

02:34 So often people might encounter migration in sort of news headlines or often quite angry

02:44 political debate or social media kind of polemics but what's missing from a lot of that is just the

02:52 sense that a migration is a human story, everyone moves for a reason, everyone has their own personal

02:58 experiences and actually it's a story that everyone has a connection to.