SCONE-based registered nurse Jan Hollows has retired after 50 years working predominantly in hospitals in the Upper Hunter – but with a farm at Parkville and plentiful community involvement, she will certainly not be idle.

“I have really enjoyed my career, I have never had any regrets and I would do it all again,” Mrs Hollows said. “I will miss the patients and the companionship of staff, though.”

Mrs Hollows is looking forward to more time with her daughter Heather and grand-daughter Annabel in Kempsey and catching up more with daughter Alison, who is a horsewoman based in Mudgee. She is also involved with Scone Rotary Club, Murrurundi CWA and Murrurundi Historical Society, where she is a regular face on Wednesdays at the museum.

Jan worked as a registered nurse at Scott Memorial Hospital from August 1999 until her retirement this year, and also did a stint at the hospital from 1981 to 1984.

Raised at the family property Minto at Crawney, past Timor, Jan did correspondence school until she was 12 years old, when boarding school beckoned. Her parents Jean and Geoff Ireland ran the sheep and cattle property as well as Beaumont at Parkville, now a 100 acre cattle farm run by Jan.

“I only ever wanted to be a vet, a nurse or a farmer,” Jan recalled. “I did my basic nurse training at Camperdown Children’s Hospital, then worked at Quirindi for 12 months before going to Brisbane to do a 12-month midwifery course.”

A stint in Sydney in mothercraft at Tresillian followed before Jan worked at Murrurundi for 13 years, becoming matron. There she married local draper Joe Walker and upon her husband’s death in 1984 she went to Mudgee to work, achieving a position as Health Senior Manager. A second marriage in 1988 resulted in Jan taking the name Hollows. She returned to Scone in 1999 for family reasons.

“The year I started at the children’s hospital in Sydney the children’s medical research foundation began and I worked in the first-ever Telethon,” she recalls.

“There have been a lot of changes; one particular change is that parents routinely stay with children in hospital now and it is so much better, not so traumatic for the child,” Jan reflected.

“The treatment of asthma and croup has changed dramatically and the introduction of more immunisation has also been a positive change – we used to see a lot of measles, mumps and chicken pox and there were still cases of polio when I first started.

“When I started there were a few antibiotics and they said that they had to be used sparingly or else organisms would develop resistance to them, and that is now becoming an issue,” Jan noted.

“There have been enormous changes in cardiac surgery. One of the first little girls I nursed had a ventricular septal defect and lot of children with these cardiac defects did not survive. Now, after an operation, many are able to lead normal lives,” she said.

“The role of the nurse has changed – it is still a caring role but clinical advances require nurses to have considerably more knowledge, and to be constantly updating knowledge. We used to study in our spare time, sometimes when we came off night duty,” she said.

“It was a very strict discipline. And there have been huge advances in every day things. It used to take us ages and ages to test urine, now it is a simple disposable strip,” she said.

“I particularly enjoyed midwifery – it is a privilege to be present at somebody’s birth.”