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 | You and Yours - Transcript BBC Radio 4 |
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| TX: 04.05.06 - REMAP PRESENTER: SHEILA MCCLENNON |
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| MCCLENNON Now an adapted knitting machine for an enthusiast who's lost an arm, a standing aid so that a father can take his rightful place next to his daughter in the wedding photos. For people with disabilities sometimes it's very hard to find specialist equipment off the shelf. In the UK four specialist companies exist to try and plug that gap, of them REMAP has been around for more than 50 years. It uses its team of technically minded volunteers, mostly retired engineers with well equipped garages or workshops, to create bespoke equipment for people with disabilities. Catherine Carr went to meet one of REMAP's volunteers as he was enjoying a well earned tea break. TILBURY So this is the workshop, we're sort of standing next to the bench, which is in the centre of the room, and there's a couple of vices - a carpenter's vice and an engineer's vice - attached to that. I'm Brian Tilbury and I'm a member of the REMAP Brent and Harrow panel. There's probably another dozen members altogether on the panel, they're engineers mostly, people - do-it-yourselfers just like me. I've always been used to problem solving, which is the major point. One of my hobbies is model engineering, I've always been keen on do-it-yourself round the house, I'm that sort of person. CARR Very neatly labelled there - door hinges, plates, bolts - you're quite a tidy engineer Brian. TILBURY I categorise stuff. Sometimes it's just in a scrabble pile but I know where things are in it. MITCHELL My name's Mary-Ann Mitchell, I run REMAP. We have approximately 1500 volunteers who are organised into round about 90 different panels, we call them, around the country. And they are helping round about three and a half thousand people every year. We only make one-off pieces of equipment for a particular person where there's nothing available for them commercially or via social services or other providers of equipment in the community. TILBURY Ah I've got here a typical example. You just try squeezing that. Hard. CARR This is for eye drops? TILBURY This is for eye drops. Now you can imagine trying to do that if you've got arthritis. CARR Impossible. TILBURY Yes, exactly. And so I made this little lever arrangement. Just slot it into the device and press a lever and it releases the cap. GYM ACTUALITY Go on keep those legs up. BENZ My name's Graham Benz, I'm one of the fitness instructors here at The SPIRE. The SPIRE is a charity, it started about 22 years ago. It was originally done for spinal research and trying to get people back into a normal way of living through rehab and sports. REMAP have helped us a lot with upgrading a few pieces of kit, which makes it now more accessible to a lot more people. Right this is basically a standing machine, also a cross trainer for people in wheelchairs. So what we find is if you're over say 5 foot 6, you have longer legs, so it's a bit more difficult to get into the machine. So what we've asked REMAP to do is actually modify the knee grips for us, so you can take them out and then get into the machine and then replace them. So it's ease of access, basically. I've been to a lot of gyms in the past and some of them you can't even get through the door. So to have a gym like this is absolutely amazing. TILBURY It's a difference from industry, I mean there's no huge budgets, we're doing things on shoestrings. But it's really - I mean there's an old saying an engineer can do for a penny what any fool can do for a pound and this is the embodiment of it. It really is turning scrap materials into useful stuff. MITCHELL Overall we do three and a half thousand jobs every year and we do that on a budget of just under £200,000. The engineers are backed up by medical professionals who will give very vital medical advice to the engineers who are making and designing equipment. BELL My name's Susan Bell, I'm an occupational therapist in the community in Harrow People First, that's Harrow Social Services. We firstly work with that person to find out what is important in their life, what's important to them to be able to do and we work with them to try and find out what is actually possible to do. KERRISON So I've attached the tube now to the trigger, I've turned the trigger on, I'll play the base drum as it is, so you can just - to give you an idea. [BOOM BOOM] Okay? BELL They may have a hobby that they have like photography, travelling abroad, going to pop festivals and they might have particular problems associated with that activity that nobody's thought of solving before. MUSIC KERRISON I started drumming when I was about 11 and from there I joined many bands and made records with ones called The Eccentrics. After that I played [indistinct words]. I play in a band called Red Wind and my name is John Kerrison and I'm the drummer. Unfortunately in '71 I had this accident which left me paralysed from the waist done, so I was grieving very badly the loss of my bass drum. I heard about REMAP through either someone at the hospital or through the Disabled Association of Hillingdon who I used to work for. So I contacted the main office and that's where I met Brian. And he'd got this fantastic little box of tricks for me which really works and I'm impressed. TILBURY It consists of a small very sensitive pressure capsule that is driven by a puff from the mouth. The sort of light puff that you would use for a musical instrument. That registers the movement and produces an electric signal to feel into a commercial drum synthesiser. KERRISON A friend of mine, Roger, who's a drummer, who I've known for 25 years, he helped me through it, we used to meet every Wednesday and he would go with me t t t, he wouldn't do it with his foot he'd do it with me. And when I first got the first signals out of the bass drum it was like - ooh I'm getting there. TILBURY I've found working for REMAP gives me a huge satisfaction, it keeps my engineering skills and brain working properly and it's just great to see the things helping people. DRUMMING KERRISON For disabled people choice is the ultimate thing, like I had choice before I got injured and now sometimes the choice gets taken away in certain areas of your life. So if they can enable choice for me, which they have done, then wow, if they can give it to anybody else that's a wow as well. MCCLENNON I feel I should be doing a massive introduction after that. That was drummer John Kerrison getting us all tapping along in the studio, even John. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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