Not content simply to stay at home raising a family, she became a member of the committee overseeing the two local long-stay psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s.

Intensive Interaction was developed during the 1980s by teachers working in schools in long-stay hospitals in southern England.

It was used as a long-stay psychiatric hospital, but in its later years most patients seemed to be ordinary people who had suffered breakdowns.

Adamson was in the group who first brought this programme to a long-stay mental hospital - Netherne Hospital - in 1946.

Only a small proportion of older people live in institutions (residential homes, nursing homes or long-stay hospitals).

The NHS used to fund such officers when patients lived in long-stay hospitals, but as people moved into the community their role was forgotten.

This is particularly important in areas where the workload is even, such as many long-stay hospitals.

For example, the policy of moving individuals with learning difficulties from long-stay hospitals into the community could have been the focus of a social marketing process.

Surveys of long-stay hospitals exposed such anomalies in the 1960s and 1970s, creating much public concern.

The numbers of mentally handicapped people in long-stay hospitals had risen to 50-60,000 by 1948, when the National Health Service was founded.