Staff at Royal Oldham Hospital held a celebration to mark 75 years of the NHS today.
Workers were all invited to an outdoor party and barbecue at the hospital’s fountain, with hospital radio station Radio Cavell providing live entertainment, and there was even a visit from Jurassic Park’s John Hammond.
Inside, stalls displayed information about the history of the NHS and Royal Oldham Hospital, including the landmark birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first ‘test tube baby’, born in the hospital.
Senior and junior doctors were present at the event, as well as nurses and other members of staff.
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Oldhamer Jackie Haye was one of the healthcare assistants attending the celebration. She has been working in the NHS trust for 14 years.
The 56-year-old wished the NHS a happy birthday, and said she had seen ‘massive changes’ during her time working.
She said: “We’ve lost a lot of staff. Covid, massively. But we’re on the way back up now, we’re getting there slowly, it will just take a few more years, but we are getting there.
"We’ve got to be positive.
“Always take the positive out of everything I do, not the negative, and you’ve got to look that way – positive attitude.”
Ms Haye decided to join the NHS after her mother died in the care of Dr Kershaw’s Hospice.
She added: “They way they looked after my mum, I said ‘I can do that job’, and I am, and I’m very proud and passionate about it still.”
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Alexander Crawley is a first-year doctor at the hospital.
Dressed in scrubs, the junior doctor, originally from Croydon, decided to join the party on his lunch break.
The 24-year-old said: “This is the 75th anniversary of the NHS so we’re having a party, it’s very nice. It’s a day at work, I’ve been cracking on all morning – very, very busy, as we always are.
“Obviously it’s very busy in the NHS at the moment, we’re very much under stress. It’s a difficult time for the NHS, a difficult time for doctors, but we’re trying to pull together and get it done to the best of our ability.
“It’s nice to have a little bit of a break with a lunch like this.”
Expanding on the stress of the job, the junior doctor echoed concerns shared by other doctors in the borough, saying: “There’s more and more patients coming in, an ageing population, and it’s difficult to keep up with it, but I feel like all the staff here at Oldham really put their all into making that possible and to give our all to the patients.”
Asked what he would like to see over the next five to 75 years, he said: “Personally, speaking just for myself here, I think that a National Health Service like this is vital.
"I think it’s vitally important that everybody, regardless of your wealth, background, or class has access to healthcare. We need to do everything we can as a society to prop that up.
“I don’t believe our current Government, and our governments for the last 40 years have had any interest in doing that, to be perfectly honest with you.
"I think that’s why we see the increased pressures and increased stress. I want to see the same level of care that we, as members of staff, and the vast majority of the public, put into the NHS by our leaders.
“They give lip service but they cut, they cut, they cut and ultimately they don’t have to see the side effects of it – we do, as members of staff and members of the public.”
Consultant physician Dr Georges Ng Man Kwong, carrying his stethoscope on him, took some time out from his busy schedule in the respiratory department to join the celebrations.
Having worked in the NHS for 30 years, he said it was a ‘great privilege’ to work with his team and healthcare professionals.
Dr Ng Man Kwong said: “I can certainly say a lot has changed. Although things are tight at the moment generally in the NHS, we do our very best to provide the best care we can to our patients and to give our staff a positive experience.
“When I first qualified I was working about 120 hours a week, working overnight without any rest – I think the shift patterns have changed now, but I would say our junior doctors now are still working really hard.
“A lot has improved around training and education for our doctors, patient safety has improved – we’re much more aware about things that can be done to protect patients in hospital.
“Doctors, nurses, therapists, working as a team to provide better outcomes and better advice."
He added: “I think there’s much more innovation going on now, and that continuous improvement is a really positive thing. We’re having to do more and more with less resource, so that is hard.
“Whilst today is a really great day of celebration, and I think we’re all proud to work in the NHS, we still have to work together to face the challenges ahead.
“The challenges we face are around increased demand on our services. More and more people attend A&E, some people say they find it very hard to access their GP so they come to hospital by default. There are more people with more disease, the older population have got more medical conditions prone to flare-ups.
“Accessing help and advice for that in the community can be quite hard sometimes so they’ll come to hospital. There’s an impact on social care, so we have people who come to hospital who are really quite frail and quite sick – they’ve been just about managing at home, but after their illness they find it very hard to manage, and we struggle to discharge people from hospital because they’re awaiting social care and support at home.”
Dr Ng Man Kwong said he would like to see more investment over the next 75 years of the NHS’s life.
He added: “There’s no doubt that we have to make efficiencies, but sometimes you need investment to allow the system time to think, to plan, to innovate and redesign.
"I think our estates definitely need improving, our hospitals are looking tired – though we are lucky in Oldham to have a brand new building opening hopefully later this year.
“A shift of care from hospital into the community is going to be really important, making sure that social care is properly funded as well, because you need both together.”
Kent Wells volunteers at Radio Cavell, Royal Oldham’s hospital radio station. He started at the hospital in 1984 – ‘one of the middle members’, he said.
He said: “We’ve actually been celebrating 70 years of hospital broadcasting in the Oldham hospitals, one of the first in the country. It’s kind of a joint celebration year this year. 70 for Cavell, 75 for the NHS.
“I think the importance of hospital radio is to provide something unique for the patients that they can’t get somewhere else, and that’s the interaction between visitors, friends and family at home, where we can do individualised requests and things they can’t do.
“We play bingo, we play hangman, we do all kinds of crossword quizzes and things like that to try and do something. Visitors really leave at 8pm, we then try to provide entertainment until 10pm at least, with live entertainment for the patients.
“You walk on the wards and you’re talking to somebody whose visitors have gone, what have they got to look forward to for a couple of hours, you can have a chat with them, play them a bit of music they like, put a smile on their face. Recognise their birthdays, if they’re in hospital for some big event.
“For every smile you put on a patient’s face, it’s worth its weight in gold.”
The day was also marked with a visit and speech from Mayor Dr Zahid Chauhan.
He thanked hospital staff in his speech, saying he had three children born in the hospital.
He also specifically thanked people who are ‘forgotten in the system’, thanking volunteers, porters, security staff, technicians, radiographers, and other non-clinical staff.
The Mayor said: “It’s really important to appreciate the amazing work people have done, but also use this opportunity to remember frontline staff who lost their lives during Covid, and to say a big thank you to people who carried on working hard through Covid onwards.”
On NHS funding, the mayor said: “The NHS is struggling, but it’s not struggling because of the staff, the NHS is struggling because we’ve got the wrong policies. Nationally, we need to agree a long-term policy for the NHS. When you say we don’t have doctors, we have universities who are giving 250 admissions and only 15 are from the UK and 235 are foreign nationals.
“I have no problem with that, but I just think that means that you have space, you can produce more doctors, we need to have more opportunities for bursaries, but most importantly you need to have a national consensus, an all-party consensus, and have a long-term plan for the NHS.”
The mayor added that he wants to see the NHS ‘double in size’ over the next 75 years.
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