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‘The NHS saved my life and has been helping me ever since’
Peter Lazenby talks to former nurse GWEN VARDIGANS who’s fighting tooth and nail for the future of our beloved health service
NHS workers on the picket line outside St Thomas' Hospital, London, May 1, 2023

GWEN VARDIGANS was born just before the founding of the NHS in July, 1948. As an adult she has spent more than half her life steeped in the National Health Service.

For 42 years she was part of NHS in York, most of them as an operating theatre nurse dealing with bowel cancer patients, and eventually as an employee of her union the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) where she trained nurses.

She’s seen the deteriorating standards caused by underfunding. But she also knows what life was like before the NHS, mainly from her parents and grandparents but also from something she was not aware of at the time it happened — her own birth.

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