IT CHANGED OUR LIVES

The day everyone and everything suddenly got so much better

- VIVIENNE AITKEN

AS A young nurse, Catherine "Kit" Reid witnessed healthcare transform overnight as the National Health Service was born on July 5, 1948.

Now Kit, 95, is marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS this week by demanding politicians unite to save our beloved service.

Telling her story of a life dedicated to saving lives, she told the Record: "I am optimistic about the future of the NHS."

But she insisted any moves to privatise it must be resisted, saying: "That would be dreadful. I am not in favour of that at all.

"We cannot go back to the way it was before with people not able to afford the insurance for health care.

"I am not for that at all - I would underline that!"

Kit started off as a nurse at Edinburgh's Royal Hospital for Children and was in the perfect position to see the effects the new NHS had on both patients and staff.

Kit said: "It was an enormous change almost immediately.

"Before the NHS a lot of parents hadn't the money to take children to the doctor with the result that when they came into hospital they were really very ill.

"The things that they died from they shouldn't have died from, had they been able to come earlier.

"They would have chest problems but by the time they came in they would have pneumonia. That was the most prevalent, as well as abdominal problems.

"The majority of children would get better but some didn't. Some of them always lived in my mind.

"I can see them yet they made such an impression on me, those poor wee things.

"There was a lot of very, very good medicine but this was right at the end of the war and supplies were short.