Valerie calls it a day

Looking forward to enjoying travel opportunities that lie ahead, she well remembers her first day on duty in the laundry at Altnagelvin on February 17, 1969, where the mechanics of keeping the wards in constant supply with freshly cleaned bedding was a more rudimentary affair.

Asked if the job had changed much in the intervening 41 years, Valerie said: “It has definitely changed. Firstly when I started I went to work on the calendars, they are the machines that iron the sheets. Two people fed the sheets into a spreader and two more lifted them and put them into the calendar. They came out the other side folded and the person at the back had to tidy them and put on trolley. Then someone took the trolley away and replaced it with an empty one.”

Valerie estimated that they got through scores of sheets in a day, but pointed out that due to mechanization advances staff can now work their way through thousands of sheets in a day.

“It has all changed You now have an automatic feed at the front and two or three people put the sheet on and the automatic feed takes it in and it goes out the other side folded. There is a counter on the machine that keeps a tally,” she said.

Not in the laundry long Valerie found herself working in a different department after a colleague went off sick.

“I was there about a year when a girl was off sick, and I went down to the packing area to cover for her until her return, but they never took me away from there as they decided they needed another body down in the packing department. So I stayed there for 30 odd years doing different tasks,” she recalled.

Among the people she most remembered from when she started include her first ‘boss’.

“My boss was Norman Burnside, and he was ‘the boss’ . He was fair, but he made sure you worked! You weren’t allowed to slack and that was that,” she said.

As with most intense working environments where the work is of a mechanized and repetitive kind, Valerie found that the craic was good, with plenty of banter, but as she said, it helped the time pass.

“I cannot believe the 40 plus years have gone so quickly. I never thought I would be there that long,” she said.

paying tribute to the many folk with whom she has worked over the years, Valerie particularly recalled Roberta Temple, beside whom she has worked and been friends with over the years.

“I’m really going to miss everybody,” she said, acknowledging her former boss Stella Burnside as well.

Asked what she would be doing to fill her new-found hours of leisure, Valerie said in the immediate future her daughter had lined up a mystery holiday.

She continued: “I hope to go on a cruise before the end of the year. Other than that, I go to Lincoln Courts Women’s Group and they do things during the year, so I will be dong that.

“Basically, I hope to have a long and Happy retirement and I hope to travel to England, where family are, including my only grandson, in Kent. So I hope to see my family more,” she said.

Maureen Kelly, Head of Support Services for the Western Trust, wished Valerie well on her retirement.

Mrs Kelly said: "I would like to thank Valerie for her dedicated service in Altnagelvin Area Hospital. Valerie and her colleagues in the laundry department and the many other members of staff working behind the scenes in Support Services have a vital role to play in ensuring that the patient experience in hospital is a positive one.

"I would like to wish Valerie a long and happy retirement."