Cambridgeshire pharmacist's 50 years of caring with the NHS celebrated

A pharmacist who has tried to retire several times is celebrating 50 years with the NHS and is thought to be one to the longest serving pharmacists in the country.

Janet Watkinson, who works for NHS Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Integrated Care System as a specialist pharmacist with the medicines optimisation team, began her career when the Beatles were playing the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1967.

After graduating from the Liverpool School of Pharmacy she started her working life at Nottingham City Hospital in 1972 as a pharmacist on a cancer ward.

This was an exciting time for pharmacy. Pharmacists left the confines of the dispensary and sallied forth onto the wards, took part in ward rounds and generally escaped from their previous role behind the glass window.

She said: “I became part of the ward team on the fledgling cancer ward, a choice which subsequently had a profound influence on my entire career.”

Over the next decade, specialist posts in pharmacy within hospitals made career development a more attractive option and again meant Janet staying in the NHS.

While working in Nottingham Janet became a specialist cancer pharmacist running both the paediatric and adult oncology/haematology wards.

Janet continued to work on oncology and immunology hospital wards for nearly 30 years, before moving to Cambridgeshire in 1999 as part of the inspectorate team at the Commission for Health Improvement in Cambridge, where her work involved assessing NHS care.

Janet said: “Being a member of CHI gave me the most amazing ability to visit NHS establishments and talk to people who really cared for patients, each other, and the NHS itself and were jumping through hoops to deliver the best care they could. It was a privilege and a time I shall never forget. All this while being the chief pharmacist at Hinchingbrooke Hospital and also being in charge of medical imaging and pathology.

She first tried to retire in 2009, but it was just the swine flu pandemic hit and she was asked to stay on and when the pandemic was over and she was again thinking of retirement Janet was again asked to help with a “bit of a problem” and she has remained ever since, notching up her incredible service of 50 years with the NHS.

I retired for the first time in 2009 just as the swine flu pandemic was hitting. I was wondering what was to be next for me when the phone rang and voice says ‘Hi Janet, are you busy?’. The fatal response – ‘No not very’ and the reply ‘Oh good, we need someone to help with the flu pandemic, can you?’ and I said ‘I guess so’- so back to the NHS I went. Coming to the end of the flu pandemic and just as I think I am going back into retirement the phone goes ‘We’ve a bit of a problem, can you help?’

Janet said: “On my bookshelf at home are gardening books from my time in Liverpool and Nottingham. Given to me on my birthday and at Christmas by my patients in the chemotherapy clinic. I remember every one of them. I remember holding Julie, a two-year-old, in my arms, after her distraught mother collapsed, cuddling her so she didn’t die in a cot. That was 40 years ago, I still cry. I remember the many successes that followed all a result of the NHS and its amazing care, compassion, and technological advances.

“One of the greatest gifts given by the NHS is the friends you make on the way. My first flatmate who worked at Nottingham with me is still one of my closest friends and along with those picked up along the way continues to enrich my life. We all joined the NHS with the same purpose – to improve the health of the population and when I look at the team today and at my clinical colleagues in our trusts, I believe that is still the reason people join.

“In 1948, when Nye Bevan created the NHS to enable all people to access healthcare regardless of economic status, he created a truly great organisation that has stood the vicissitudes of time. The NHS is not a right, it is a privilege and while we have a duty of care to our population, our population has a duty of care to protect the NHS and they should not lose sight of that.

“As I come to the end of my career, I look back on the immense progress we have made in pharmaceuticals from rolling pills on a dispensary bench to manufacturing biologicals from hardworking E. coli, and I believe the future will be even more extraordinary thanks to the NHS.”