News Focus: Celebrations will mark milestone for the health service, writes Helen Puttick

When Margaret Taylor started her nursing career in Glasgow there were two thermometers to a ward.

She earned £3 and one shilling a month at the ear, nose and throat hospital in St Vincent Street and, after paying for her digs, there was little left over for food. She remembers returning lemonade bottles to a shop with colleagues in order to buy extra dinner - three fish suppers between five or six of them.

She was only a teenager at the time and the national health service had not even begun.

Sixty years on, Ms Taylor was in George Square to help launch plans to celebrate the diamond anniversary of the National Health Service, aided by a walking stick following a knee replacement operation.

She said: "I think people were cared for just as well in the hospital setting back then because the staff cared for them and the doctors cared for them, but we didn't have all the wonderful things we have today. Half of it was hit and miss."

From the very beginning of the NHS on July 5 1948, Ms Taylor, 77, says conditions began to improve, starting with her salary and working hours.

The range of equipment also increased and she soon had more than two thermometers per ward.

As the service modernised, so her career progressed and she rose through the ranks to senior nursing officer at the Southern General, in charge of night duty across all but the maternity wards.

However, she said not everything is better today than it was at the beginning.

"It was cleaner before because the nurses did a lot of the cleaning," she said.

"We had to pull the beds out and clean under the bed legs and scrub and scrape the lockers. The ward maids were terrific.

"They ran the wards with an iron fist. We were more scared of the ward maids than the sisters."

Not that she felt the Southern was dirty when she returned there for her knee operation in February. "We had a very good maid," she laughed. "I watched her - old habits die hard."

She noted the ward she stayed in had both male and female patients, a situation she feels is less than ideal, but said: "It was very well run.

"The sister did her best and so did her staff."

In fact, Ms Taylor, originally from Knightswood, said she would hate to turn back the hospital clock 60 years.

Joan Whyteside, who was also invited to George Square to kick-start the anniversary activities along with her mother Betty, is living testimony to the medical advances of the last half-century.

Her older sister, Margaret, died from kidney failure at the age of 10. A decade later, when Joan also suffered kidney problems, she became one of the first people in Scotland to undergo a transplant operation.

Margaret was only a toddler when her condition was diagnosed, after she failed to recover from the measles.

Betty recalled: "We took her to Yorkhill (children's hospital) and they said then they could not cure her, but she had a powder to take three times a day. We went to the hospital every month. It seemed to help her a little bit, but then as she got older she was not growing properly."

Kidney transplants were already taking place in America by 1958, and the family asked if they could become donors to save their daughter, but doctors said Margaret was too ill for the surgery and she died that year.

Joan, who was five at the time, said she remembers her sister no longer being around but did not really understand what was wrong. She was 15 when doctors found her own kidneys were shrinking. By then her sister's medical notes had been destroyed in a fire.

At first Joan was put on a strict diet, limiting her to specially made bread and pasta, meat and vegetables while her peers enjoyed crisps and chocolate. But despite her sacrifices a biopsy revealed her kidneys were deteriorating.

Betty said she feared history was repeating itself and she was about to lose a second daughter. But there was treatment available for Joan which Margaret never had. First she was put on dialysis and then in 1972 she had her kidney transplant operation.

"You try to put the thought that something could go wrong to the back of your mind," said Betty. "I remember the first time we went out of the hospital over to the university cafe in Byres Road and Joan had a bacon roll. I thought: She's going to be alright'."

At 86, Betty remembers having to pay for visits from the GP before the NHS was established. "You had to think twice if you wanted the doctor out to the house because it cost half a crown," she said.

She is only too aware that paying for all the treatment her family has needed over the years would have been impossible.

But along with other patients, they fund-raised to help improve the transplant service. Joan remembers staff presenting a fellow organ recipient with a bill for his treatment as fun. It came to more than £1000 at a time when a flat cost hundreds of pounds.

She said: "We moan about the NHS if anything goes wrong, but forget about all the good things that happen and the people that are alive because of it."

A healthy history

• 1913 Highlands and Islands medical service established - a state-funded healthcare system and a forerunner of the UK-wide NHS.
• 1936 The Cathcart Report is published, setting out a vision for a new Scottish health service.
• 1942 The Beveridge Report is published, in which economist William Beveridge sets out his vision of a post-war Welfare State.
• 1947 An act is passed in Scotland to set up the NHS.
• 1948 The NHS comes into being across the UK with July 5 the official "vesting" day.
• 1951 Scottish TB patients are airlifted to Switzerland amid a chronic shortage of beds and nurses.
• 1952 Prescription charges are introduced - one shilling, or 5p.
• 1958 The first ultrasound scanners are created in Glasgow.
• 1959 The UK's first nursing studies centre opens in Edinburgh.
• 1960 The first successful kidney transplant in the UK is performed in Edinburgh.
• 1972 The first major reorganisation in Scotland since the advent of the NHS establishes 15 regional health boards.
• 1974 The NHS family planning service brings formal provision of free contraceptive advice to all, irrespective of age and marital status.
• 1980 The Black report highlights a growing gap between the rich and poor despite the investment in the NHS.
• 1982 The first case of Aids is identified in Scotland.
• 1987 Keyhole surgery is performed in Dundee, in a first for the UK.
• 1992 Controversial private finance initiatives for building and maintaining hospitals come into being.
• 2006 Professor David Kerr sets out his vision for the next 20 years of the NHS in Scotland.
• 2008 The SNP announces its programme for the future of the NHS.
  
  The events
  
  
• June: First web history of the NHS in Scotland goes live.
• June 24-25: NHS National Conference, SECC Glasgow, featuring a This Is Your Life event recognising staff, patients and carers from the past and present.
• July 2: Reception hosted by First Minister Alex Salmond at Edinburgh Castle.
• July 6: Special Sunday service and multi-faith celebration at St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.
• November 6: Annual Scottish Health Awards at the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh.
• Regional health boards will hold events including family fun days, tea parties, photographic exhibitions, charity balls and ceilidhs. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is holding its own awards ceremony on July 5 in the Royal Concert Hall.