AGENDA: From Nightingale Nurse to High Tech of Today; Medical and Technological Innovations over the Past 60 Years Have Led to Major Advances in Health Care since the NHS Was Created. Health Correspondent Emma Brady Asked Staff and Volunteers What Changes Have Had the Biggest Impact

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Byline: Emma Brady

Shaunagh Wand was a nurse at St Thomas's Hospital in London between 1950 and 1960.

She is now a League of Friends volunteer at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Edgbaston.

"I was a Nightingale nurse when I qualified in 1950. The NHS was seen as a marvellous innovation and our training was superb, but tough.

We would be apprentices for a year, spending most of our time on the wards, fetching bed pans, washing patients and working under keen supervision of a ward sister or matron.

They would come round and run their fingers over everything doing regular dust checks.

Back then the patients were 'gods' so everything had to be done perfectly for them. Everybody appreciated that but I think the NHS has moved on from that belief now.

When I first started I was on a ward where they had started doing heart operations, and lots of them died, but the advances in medicine since then have been tremendous, and as a result people are getting more effective treatment and living longer.

As far as nursing goes, I think it's good that nurses are getting university qualifications, but they're becoming more academic than practical, there's been a definite shift away from what we called 'bedside nursing'.

Patients were in bed longer than they are today, and I'm sure nurses still do a good job, but all this MRSA and C.diff must mean something's gone wrong. I think it's the ward supervision that's lacking.

I think free …