THE Fylde's own Florence Nightingale is retiring after 40 years of caring for elderly patients.

Nan Johnson has worked nights at Wesham Hospital since 1958, making her the Fylde Community Health Trust's longest-serving member of staff, but from Friday she will swap bed pans for bingo and thermometers for fridge magnets when she has more time to concentrate on her hobbies.

Born and bred in Carlisle, Nan moved into nursing after work in a noisy factory had left her deaf.

She said: "I went to the Labour Exchange and told them I wanted to nurse.

"I was desperate to get away from home and said I'd go to Newcastle or Blackpool - the two places I'd visited on day trips."

A vacancy came up for an auxiliary nurse at Wesham Hospital and she has been there ever since.

"It was hard work in those days with nine wards of 34 beds and only one nurse on duty at night," she recalled.

"The patients were real geriatrics, none of them ever went home again.

"There was a lot of heavy lifting and you worked a 48-hour shift."

But it didn't put Nan off and she completed six months' training in 1961 to become an enrolled nurse.

"We had a lot of fun in the days of the old matron, playing tricks on awkward nurses behind her back," she went on.

"You don't really get to know the hospital managers these days but the care we can offer is so much better with antibiotics. Still my patients were always well looked after."

Her association with the hospital goes very deep.

There she met her husband Eric - a hotel chef who had become a nursing assistant - and married from the nurses' home with her matron laying on a meal there for her entire family.

Even when her sons David and Mark were born she was soon back on the ward.

Nan, who now lives in Butler Street, Blackpool, says retirement has come too quickly, adding: "I made some very good friends and will miss them all."

She will be keeping herself busy, though, hoping to do some bank nursing and giving more time to her hobbies of playing bingo and collecting fridge magnets, of which she has more than 100 from all over the world.

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