A class of Addenbrooke’s nurses who trained together forty years ago – and are now scattered as far as Australia – reunited in Cambridge on Friday evening.
It took 18 months for all 16 classmates to find each other online, after the idea of a reunion was posted on social media. Among the group will be one nurse coming from New Zealand, and two from Australia.
The nurse training class of January 1983 met in the hospital’s Frank Lee Centre, close to where the old training school once stood.
Classmates had the chance to catch up, exchange memories, and take photographs before embarking on a weekend of activities like punting, meals out – and plenty of trips down Memory Lane.
Forty years on, classmate Patricia Antill still works at Addenbrooke’s, specialising in the plastic surgery department before moving on to ENT outpatients.
Patricia said it was great fun catching up on WhatsApp with old friends, most of whom are now in their 60s, but nothing matched meeting face-to-face.
The reunion came in the same week that the NHS celebrated its 75th anniversary (5 July), making it even more poignant.
Patricia added:
It was extremely exciting. We all completed our two years’ training together, and then went off to work at various wards around the hospital.
We remained close, but of course over the years people moved on, got married, had children, and some even moved to the other side of the world.
I think some of them were very surprised to see how Addenbrooke’s looks now, because it, and the surrounding area, have changed hugely over four decades.
Patricia Antill
Parts of the hospital not built 40 years ago include the large Addenbrooke’s Treatment Centre to the right of the original building. Most of the Biomedical campus did not exist.