Nurse clocks off after 50 years at Wanganui Hospital

Phil van den Broek's commitment to Wanganui Hospital can only be described as outstanding.
But now, after a nursing career that began in 1955, she is taking retirement.
Proof that age is no barrier, Mrs van Den Broek, 72, finishes today and will have time to reflect on a half century in which she witnessed major advances in health.
She trained to become a registered nurse at the hospital straight out of secondary school and, apart from four-and-a-half years away, having family, she has worked there ever since.
"I came to the hospital as an aide in 1955 when I was still at school. It was a school holiday job. But I started my training in 1956," Mrs van den Broek said.
In the intervening 55 years she has seen major change both in terms of frontline nursing and to the bricks and mortar of Wanganui Hospital itself.
She did her general nurse training first then maternity nursing because that was the way they were taught in those days.
She has since worked in every facet of nursing within the hospital and finishes her career as clinical nursing specialist for infection control.
She remembered her first visit to hospital as a teenager was to visit a friend who'd had her appendix removed.
"This nurse came along and took her temperature, and I thought, 'I could do that'.
"We'd heard at school that students could go nurse-aiding during the holidays. We biked all over the city looking for work, but the following year we got positions as aides at Wanganui Hospital," she said.
Mrs van den Broek started in a men's orthopaedic ward.
"I was only 15 at the time and very green. It took me half the day to get into the starched uniform."
She worked in school holidays in 1955, and the matron invited her to join the nursing intake the following January, as long as she passed her School Certificate.
"Actually, you had to be 18 to start training, and I was only 16. But there were three of us under age, so they made us cadet nurses."
She started her training at the old Newcombe Ward, looking after patients caught in the polio epidemic.
"These were patients who were in iron lungs. People today have no idea what that was like, especially for those patients," she said.
"The most dreadful thing about polio was you could be completely paralysed but could still feel everything. A crumb in the bed or a crease in the sheet - they could feel everything."
Mrs van den Broek has witnessed change on a broad scale from a time when all the wards were open and the matrons operated from a desk at one end of the ward.
"But it was a different time and place, and since then we've seen huge social change.
"The technology advances, changes in the laboratory and radiology, along with the treatment, have so vastly improved."
She's seen change in governance at a district health board level as well, working through the years when the board was responsible for hospitals at Patea, Taihape, Raetihi as well as the mental health facility at Lake Alice.
Her retirement will be filled with gardening, reading, and, of course, family and grandchildren.
"It's time for me to go. Now I'll have some time for myself and not be governed by my watch," Mrs van den Broek said.