SEVENTEEN years ago, Swindon’s first cohort of would-be home-grown nurses stepped through the gates of the new Ferndale campus, ready to train and deliver compassionate care to their community.

Together the 17 students made history, reviving and building on Swindon’s proud healthcare legacy as the pioneering town which once upon a time inspired the creation of the NHS, no less.

From humble beginnings, the offshoot of Oxford Brookes University’s nursing department has grown exponentially since 1999, attracting more than 550 undergraduates over nearly two decades and currently welcoming 130 students a year.

Now embarking on the next phase in Swindon, the university is poised to leave Ferndale and unveil a new £10m campus at Delta Business Park this summer and is marking the occasion with a celebration of nursing in Swindon.

The milestone is an opportunity to delve into the history books.

While Oxford Brookes is commemorating 17 years of nursing education on the Ferndale campus, Swindon’s medical history goes much further back – nearly 170 years.

According to Swindon Heritage’s valuable archives, while the town’s gigantic workshops were once the beating heart of the Great Western Railway (the world’s greatest), just as impressive were its social and welfare systems.

In fact, Britain’s greatest invention, the National Health Service, was inspired by the GWR Medical Fund, which was founded in Swindon in 1847.

A century later, Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the NHS, found the Fund was the perfect blueprint for his plan, noting: “There it was: a complete health service. All we had to do was to expand it to embrace the whole country.”

Although founded by chief engineer Daniel Gooch, the Fund was run by the workers, for the workers, who paid for it directly from their wages.

It was a true ‘cradle to grave’ system, from pre-natal care to funeral services. The Works even manufactured artificial limbs for injured workers, while railwaymen and their families all had access to washing baths, swimming baths and even Turkish baths.

The GWR built a house for its doctor – Park House, which still stands today – and opened a cottage hospital, now a community centre, in 1872.

It was fitting, then, that the NHS’s first new hospital, named after Princess Margaret, was built in Swindon.

Just as fitting was the naming of the town’s new NHS hospital, which opened in 2002, as the Great Western Hospital.

Swindon’s advanced healthcare traditions can be seen in parts of the story of the town’s workhouse, at Stratton, which was one of the most enlightened in Victorian times, and its infirmary evolved into a general hospital that provided excellent care for long-term and elderly patients.

The former workhouse site also hosted military casualties during the Second World War, caring for severely burned tank crews after D-Day, while Lydiard Park, on the western outskirts of town, hosted two temporary hospitals – firstly for American forces and then for German prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, RAF Princess Alexandra Hospital, at nearby Wroughton, provided full medical services to Armed Forces personnel until the 1990s.

Swindon workers also have a history of producing a range of medical equipment. During the First World War the GWR Works turned out fully-equipped ambulance trains, and among many companies with bases, offices or factories in the town in more recent times were surgical equipment developers Deloro Stellite and capsule manufacturers RP Scherer.

The world’s first heart transplant, in 1967, was carried out with equipment developed and manufactured by Vickers-Armstrong at South Marston.

Swindon even has connections with one of the world’s most famous nurses, Charlotte Wilsdon. Born in Abingdon, Charlotte later moved to Swindon and is buried at Radnor Street Cemetery, under her married name, Andrews.

She answered Florence Nightingale’s appeal for volunteers during the Crimean War, and set sail with her in November 1854.

It was with great regret that Florence sent Charlotte home, on medical advice, in May 1856, with a hand-written reference claiming she was “a kind, active and useful nurse” and – unlike many of their colleagues – “a strictly sober woman”.

Restoring Swindon at the heart of healthcare training, since 1999, Oxford Brookes’s adult nursing course has allowed mature students to find a new vocation and, crucially, to train close to home.

“I had always wanted to get into nursing,” says student nurse Julie Cracknell who enrolled in Oxford Brookes’s adult nursing course at Ferndale last September.

“After researching more into what would be involved in returning to education again, I decided to give it a go. Oxford Brookes’s Adult Nursing course is great because it allows me to study close to home in Swindon. I will be looking forward to seeing the new Swindon campus when it opens in the summer and using the new facilities.

"So far I'm really enjoying the course and look forward to the learning and challenges ahead.”

For the Great Western Hospital, being able to rely on a pool of home-grown nurses, in the midst of an unprecedented nursing shortage, has been invaluable.

“Each year, around 80 per cent of the graduating nurses from Oxford Brookes join us on our wards at the Great Western Hospital and we hope that this will continue for many years to come,” says Oonagh Fitzgerald, director of human resources at the Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

“We are absolutely delighted at Oxford Brookes University’s decision to move to a new campus and offer the nurses of tomorrow the best environment possible to learn the skills needed in what is an extremely rewarding career.

“Nurses often travel around and, while they’re more than capable of giving great patient care wherever they are in the world, it’s always extra special when locally-trained nurses choose to start their career at their local hospital, supporting people from their hometown.”

Steeped in history, the new multi-million-pound campus in the Delta 900 building at Delta Business Park is expected to train around 1,300 nurses over the next 10 years, preparing them for the growing and ever-changing demands of a profession which, aside from the devotion and duty of care at its core, bears little resemblance to what Charlotte Wilsdon or Florence Nightingale would have called nursing.

“From fetching and carrying, following doctors’ orders, and interminable cleaning (which I remember as late as the 1970s) today’s nurses are more likely to be assessing patients and instigating care and treatment, prescribing medication, facilitating a multi-disciplinary – and often multiagency – team , educating patients and carers, supervising students, and undertaking their own research into areas of clinical need,” says Professor June Girvin, pro-vice chancellor and dean of the Faculty of Health and Science at Oxford Brookes.

“All combined with those key attributes of warmth, compassion, efficiency and safety. The future will bring even more changes to that scope of practice – the nurse as independent consultant, gateway to services, deliverer of complex care. It is already a very challenging healthcare world for nurses and will continue to be challenging, exciting and rewarding in equal measure.

“Educating nurses is the best way to ensure the resilience that retains kindness and compassion, enhance the knowledge base that produces flexibility, competence and safety, and develop the confidence that leads to excellence, clinical judgement and accountability.”

Ahead of the inauguration of the new campus in Swindon and as part of Oxford Brookes’s celebration of nursing in Swindon, the university will hold a series of events. To find out more about upcoming events go to http://nursing.brookes.ac.uk/125-years/events.