A DEDICATED nurse from Blaenau Ffestiniog has celebrated 40 years of working in the NHS.

Community Advanced Nurse Practitioner Lorraine Hewlett began her training in Birmingham at the age of 17.

Eventually promotion and family ties brought her to Bala in the 1980s, before Lorraine moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog where she’s been for the last nine years.

“Before coming to north Wales I’d mainly worked in cities and towns, so to work in a rural environment was initially challenging,” Lorraine said.

“When the weather was bad we’d have to go out on tractors, because we had no other way of reaching some people, we had no mobile phones or computers back then.

“The people here are tough though, and they look after themselves and help each other out a lot.”

Looking back over her career, Lorraine says it is the patients in this rural Gwynedd community that have really left their mark.

She continued: “There have been some sad times obviously, but there’s been plenty of fun, too. I remember going to see one patient who had lambs keeping warm on the bottom of her bed.

“Another lady I knew was seriously ill, and on Christmas Eve she’d opened the door to the cooker and burnt her wig.

“So there we sat cutting all the melted bits off her wig so she could look beautiful for her last Christmas with her family. These are the moments that stay with me.”

There have been significant developments in nursing, and Lorraine has shown strong commitment to continuing her professional development, and she counts gaining her Masters in Advanced Clinical Skills at Bangor university in 2011 as one of her highlights: “You have to remind yourself how different it all was when we started out.

“District nursing has moved on so much, but it’s nice to change with it and not remain static.

“I have no regrets about going into nursing, and I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”