Celebrating 40 Years at MKUH

Claire Barklamb 

Claire Barklamb was one of the nurses working at the original community hospital on the Eaglestone site and watched the new large hospital being built.

Now, over 40 years later, Claire is still working at MKUH on Ward 21a in her specialised role as an orthopaedic nurse. Her former colleague and friend Janet Low is now retired but both have vivid memories of the early days at the brand-new facility.

‘It’s easy to see things from a nostalgic point of view but without computers, some of the note-taking work seemed much more straightforward. For instance, the night staff wrote notes in red and the day staff wrote in black so it was easy to see the timescale of a patient’s treatment at a glance,’ says Claire who left nursing to care for her young family not long afterwards. ‘Childcare back in the 1980s was quite hard to come by so once the children were a bit bigger, I worked in schools and then returned to nursing in 2010.’Janet remembers that when the hospital opened, many of the walls were painted green and most areas were carpeted.‘There were no electric beds in 1984 so it was a very physical role. Repositioning patients took a lot of strength and technique. Interestingly, all the lifting methods we were trained are now banned these days, which is probably quite a good thing!’ says Janet.

Both nurses remember the wards having large day rooms, with patients encouraged to mobilise and eat their meals together if they were able. Claire also recalls taking a group of recuperating stroke inpatients for a night out at the British Legion club in Newport Pagnell. ‘We helped them into the minibus and stayed with them so they could have a sherry and a change of scene – obviously that sort of thing would never happen now. But back then, patients were often in hospital a very long period of time and would have been essentially convalescing in the last few weeks of their stay and getting ready to go home,’ adds Claire.

Jennie Mohammed

Jennie Mohammed was one of three students from the Northampton School of Radiography who did their training at Milton Keynes Hospital the year it opened in 1984.
She enjoyed the workplace so much that when she qualified in 1988, she accepted a permanent post and worked at MK until she retired in September 2023 after almost 40 years here. Jennie was following in family footsteps – two aunts and an uncle are radiographers, and her mum is a nurse. The hospital is very dear to Jennie’s heart – not least because she met her future husband at work. Khalil Mohammed was a trauma and orthopaedic Associate Specialist and Jennie was often on-call in theatres when he was on duty.

‘Khalil was doing a lot of trauma work at the time, and we got on really well. But it wasn’t until I told him I was leaving to train students at Cranfield University that he suggested we met for a drink,’ says Jennie. After a couple of years, the couple moved from hospital accommodation and bought their first house together in MK and married in 1995.
When you look back it was an amazing way to start a career,’ says Jennie. ‘Everything was brand new, and all the staff were new to the hospital and finding their feet together.
The Imaging department has always been in the same place – behind the Emergency Department. Everybody knew everybody and when on call at night, the Imaging and Emergency staff would sit together, chat and support each other if time allowed.

The walls were painted yellow and green and everywhere was carpeted! That does seem unbelievable now.’
Back then, all female staff were required to wear a dress uniform, but this later changed to tunic and trousers, which was much more practical. ‘To begin with we only had x-ray and ultrasound and the League of Friends did a major fundraising campaign to buy a CT scanner. We had a float in the carnival to fundraise for the scanner. The then Duchess of York, Sarah Fergusson came to officially open CT – I still have a photograph of myself at the afternoon tea the Trust arranged with her.’

When Woodhill first opened, the radiographers were required to go over there to x-ray the inmates. Nowadays they come here but I recall some funny incidents, one in particular being a radiographer turning up with a screwdriver in her pocket, causing much to do and raised eyebrows with the prison guards when they found it!
Technology massively transformed the work of the radiography teams. ‘It seems so old fashioned now, but patients used to come in and we would write their name and date of birth on a label and use a light to mark the details onto the x-ray film. We used to have packets and packets of x-rays that needing storing and in the very early days, worked in dark rooms to develop the x-rays.’ Back in the 1980s, Jennie’s department was very active in the community too.

‘We had a float in the MK Carnival every year and the designs got more elaborate as the years went by. Champagne fountains, smoke machines, a live band and Radiologists dressed as parrots!’ adds Jennie. Jennie went on to extend her role and spent the last few years of her time at MKUH as a reporting radiographer, taking a lead role in the department’s successful accreditation from Quality Imaging Services.

Jen Isherwood

Consultant Jen Isherwood has a long-standing connection with MKUH – not least because she was one of the first babies born here in December 1984.
Jen’s mum, Caroline, gave birth to her baby daughter on the hospital’s brand new Labour Ward on December 26, 1984 surrounded by festive decorations.
Caroline was admitted to labour ward at 8pm Christmas Day and it was deserted. They were admitted to a private room with an armchair for dad. She remembers walking the empty corridors on the evening of Christmas Day, doing laps of the ‘square’, to keep progressing the labour. Jen was born about 3am, the whole family came to visit the next morning and Caroline was discharged about mid-morning.

‘Apparently I was actually due on December 16 and my parents were supposed to be travelling north to see family,’ says Jen. ‘ My dad had a reputation as a bit of a practical joker and told relatives on Christmas Day that Mum was in labour – of course nobody believed him but it turned out to be true!’Jen was always interested in studying medicine and after graduating from Imperial College, London she returned to MKUH in 2009 as a house officer, which in those days was the term for a junior doctor on rotation. She credits her time here as a very influential one and cites surgeon Barrie Keeler as the inspiration for why she chose to become a surgeon.

‘Barrie was the reason I became a surgeon. When I was here in 2009, he was my registrar and mentor. He was incredibly approachable and inspiring,’ explains Jen, who left the Trust to continue her training before coming full circle and rejoining the staff of MKUH as a consultant oncoplastic breast surgeon in October 2022.
To top things off, Jen’s own daughter Matilda was born at MKUH in April 2023 and she found temporarily being a patient as well as a member of staff a very positive experience.
‘At the time I lived nearer a different hospital but the thought of having to drive to all my antenatal appointments put me off. It was much easier just to walk down the corridor for all my check-ups!’ she adds.

Miss Jen Isherwood – Consultant Oncoplastic Breast Surgeon

Beverley Glasspool

Beverley Glasspool joined the staff of MKUH in August 1984 fresh from college, having completed her secretarial training at the Bletchley Campus of MK College. She started as a shorthand typist, then became a personal assistant to the medical records manager and worked in the general office before moving to Paediatrics in 1993, where she has been ever since.
She currently works in a close-knit team of six patient pathway coordinators who are responsible for ensuring that the patients of the hospital’s 14 paediatric consultants get to the care and services they need . They include Sandra Davis and Susan Rene, who also joined the Trust in its very early days.

‘We were all at college studying for secretarial roles around the same time,’ says Beverley. ‘Of course, it was very different back then. To begin with there were no computers, only electric typewriters and we used a special liquid called Tippex to cover up any typing mistakes! One of our most treasured items was the medical dictionary – I used to consult mine all the time when typing up patient letters. There was no internet or google, so the medical dictionary was a must to ensure we spelt everything correctly.’ Without email, there was also a lot more running about the site to check things like the availability of clinic rooms. In the early days, Beverley’s job title was medical secretary and she sat near the consultants.’ That worked really well as if you had a query, you could just ask there and then, whereas now space is at such a premium we tend to communicate via email,’ says Beverley.

The role of patient pathway coordinator is considerably more complex than the original role of the medical secretary. ‘’We are responsible for job plans, organising clinics, and often moving clinics around when consultant availability changes unexpectedly. We have a considerable amount of patient contact too via phone calls and emails. And with our speciality being paediatrics, there is often a lot of compassionate listening required as parents are often very anxious about their child.’ Sandra met Beverley on her first day in the Trust and got to know Sue soon afterwards. ‘We’ve almost grown up together – we’ve all worked here since the 1980s, had our children and come back again. We’re a very close-knit team and have seen so many changes since the early days,’ says Sandra. Sue adds: ‘Obviously, the biggest change has been the growth of the hospital and the increasing number of patients we deal with as people settled down and had their families in Milton Keynes. As a patient pathway coordinator, no two days are the same and we are always busy as new patients are coming through all the time.’

 

Carole Clarke

Nurse Carole Clarke has vivid memories of the opening of MKUH – stepping on to the brand new orthopaedic ward with its gleaming new beds and equipment, green walls and brown carpet. ‘Those first couple of weeks, it was just the nurses on the ward, getting ready for the hospital to open,’ recalls Carole. ‘The healthcare assistants started a couple of weeks later. We did lots of practical things before the first patients arrived, like preparing beds and we also went out to visit care homes and get to know the local area as many of us were new to Milton Keynes.’
Carole, who took early retirement in summer 2023, still does two or three bank shifts caring for trauma and orthopaedic patients. She chose to remain a staff nurse rather than rise through the ranks to management.

‘I just love caring for patients. Back in the 1980s, patients often stayed in hospital a lot longer than they do today so as nurses we really got to know them as people. Over the years, I have also mentored many student nurses, which is immensely rewarding as you see them go on to develop their careers.’
Carole did her nursing training in her home town of Banbury and went on to work at Northampton General Hospital. She married her late husband Chris in 1982 and when they heard the building of a new hospital was underway in Milton Keynes, they set their hearts on moving to the new city.
‘We had our lives ahead of us and the attraction of working in a brand new, purpose-built hospital was really exciting,’ says Carole. ‘Many of the staff moved to the area to work here like I did, so it was wonderful to be right there at the beginning.’

Carole has watched the hospital and its facilities grow with the population.‘Of course, the hospital has had to expand to cater for the needs of the people who live here and it’s still a friendly place. When I started, it was a fraction of the size it is today and there was a real sense of us all being at the start of a new era. People were so pleased that they had a hospital on their doorstep at last,’ she adds.

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