The London museum dedicated to Florence Nightingale is offering online consultations with the famous Lady with the Lamp herself...or at least an actress playing her.
The 45-minute Zoom calls are inspired by the sessions run in the museum’s theatre before lockdown with actress Amber Lickerish as the legendary figure.
The 25-year-old, who has been playing Nightingale for the past year around a year, said some of her best audiences were nurses themselves.
“We get a lot of groups of nurses and American nurses absolutely love her.
“I think she is just so inspiring for them. In England nurses will have learnt about her in their primary school and in the US nurses still say a pledge to her when they qualify,” she said.
“There is a certain amount of ad-libbing but I know her so well by now she could be my mastermind subject. Florence led such a well documented life, there are letters and diaries, so we can know what she was doing and thinking at any one time.”
The Florence Nightingale Museum, which opened in 1989 in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital near Waterloo, charges £120 per session which can be attended by up to 100 people. The revenue is helping the attraction plug the financial gap caused by lockdown.
A fundraising appeal has raised £30,000 to help it keep going. The museum is also selling Florence Nightingale facemasks in a bid to raise more money.
It was just 10 days into its latest exhibition as part of a planned year of celebrations marking Nightingale’s 200th anniversary when the the first lockdown happened. Before the second lockdown its visitor figures had dropped as low as 10 per cent of its normal level.
Melissa Chatton, the museum’s assistant director of learning and community engagement, said there had been a “collective outpouring of support”.
She said: “Like so many businesses who made it through the first phase of this global challenge, we’re quickly realising that we still have very uncertain and problematic months ahead and are experiencing loss daily.
“We will continue our efforts to attract and engage visitors in new ways but our fundraising campaign to save the Museum sadly can’t stop.”
