NHS sixties memories

Your photos of people who worked in healthcare in the 1950s and 1960s on your NHS60 website (www.nhs60.co.uk) have brought memories flooding back, writes Susan Bethell

I was a pre-nursing student at Monsall Isolation Hospital in Manchester from 1963-65 before doing my three-year training at the Manchester Royal group of hospitals from 1965-68.

The first ward that I worked on in 1963 had patients who were suffering from polio, being nursed in the "tank respirators" (large wooden structures which made very strange noises).

It was only just before that time that tuberculosis patients had been nursed outdoors at night as a treatment. Whooping cough was very common and the paediatric wards were full of extremely ill babies and children.

Caring for these patients was very distressing, you would see them turning blue and then black as their lungs were starved of oxygen due to coughing spasms.

Although prevention and treatment have advanced incredibly I feel that, sadly, the basic nursing skills and the care given in those days has not been maintained.

Susan Bethell, community nurse, Lincolnshire