NEW mums and midwives praised the NHS as the hospital welcomed babies born on the 70th anniversary of the health service

Great Western Hospital staff had delivered five babies by mid-afternoon, with midwives calling it a relatively calm day.

The three girls and two boys were recovering with their mothers at the Swindon hospital’s maternity unit.

Sakshi Pandey, 36, of the town centre, gave birth to her daughter before breakfast time. The youngster, dressed in yellow and yet to be named, was calmly sleeping in a cot beside her mother’s bed: “She took less than an hour. I was admitted here at 5.30am and she came at 6.22am.

“I wanted a girl. It’s a dream come true. I had a boy already and I hoped for one of each.”

A microbiologist by profession, Sakshi hoped her girl would grow up to be a doctor - the career she always wanted. Her son, 10, wants to be an astronaut: “But it’s up to them and their desiny. I won’t force them. It’s their choice and their life.”

Sashki praised the NHS: “It is everything for me, the treatment I have had has been very good. Today, the staff have been brilliant.”

Overseeing the ward, clinical midwifery manager Kathryn Owen said: “It’s been a calm day today. It’s all gone to plan.”

Kathryn qualified as a nurse in 1988 in Swindon, before moving into widwifery almost a decade later: “Things have changed a lot, patients’ needs are more complex. Ladies who wouldn’t have had babies 20 or 30 years ago are now able to have them through IVF. Medicine has evolved.

“There’s a lot of paperwork now and we’re a lot busier in many different ways.”

Her most memorable delivery was her first as a midwife, she said. It was exactly 21 years ago, July 5, 1997, at the Princess Margaret Hospital: “He was a twin, the second baby.

“I remember it because you had to see five births before you were allowed to deliver a baby. My fifth birth was the first twin, so I delivered the second.

“All was fine and, in fact, a few years later I looked after the lady again.”