From extremely poor beginnings Shirley Phillips worked her way up to the highest levels of the nursing profession. As the daughter of a coal miner in the valleys of South Wales, the hardships she endured as a child could have easily destroyed her spirit, but instead her experiences formed her and fed her desire to care, to do good work, and to see good work done. The patients, public and staff she encounters as she progresses from pupil nurse to teacher of nurses all help to develop her as a person and a professional. As she begins her training relatively late in life she finds echoes of her childhood in her working day. Looking back on her journey through life, the happy and the sad times and the characters she meets all add a richness to the story of a full life lived in the caring profession.
About the Author: Shirley Phillips, RGN. Dip in N (London) Cert.Ed. (FE) RCNT, RNT, (Retired) Times to Weep, Times to Laugh is a memoir of her life as a nurse. Her training began in 1970. She eventually became a nurse tutor in 1981 and retired from the NHS in 1993. Thereafter, she continued to train nurses in the private sector and ultimately retired from there in 2002.Some events within these memoirs are related to her past as the fourth of five children born into the hard life of a miner's family in a South Wales valley. Large families lived in small, back-to-back houses and strived to provide the essentials for existence. At the age of seventeen she applied to enter nurse training but was rejected as being unfit for the heavy tasks involved. She has a spinal curvature. The content of her writing will reveal that she overcame this and was accepted into nurse training seventeen years later.Shirley Phillips met and travelled widely with her husband who was then an army officer. She worked as a voluntary nurse in a number of overseas countries and was involved in some of the violent results of insurgency. She carried out voluntary nursing in Ghana, Aden, Kenya and she occasionally lectured in the RIPAS Hospital in Brunei. With her husband, for five months in 1984, she helped him when he was with UNESCO on a project in Paris and Nigeria to aid disabled children.She was in the caring profession for thirty years and, at times was deeply involved in events that reminded her of some of the horrors of her past: illicit abortion, sexual abuse, rape, murder, family conflicts, racism, and the victimization of miners. Whilst a nurse she was reminded of those nightmarish events of her past. She has emphasised differences between the care of the sick and injured in her childhood and youth and how it is now. However, she points out, to her the change in direction of general nurse training was not necessarily for the better.The Nursing Times (May 2002) has commented: "Project 2000 was not the success the Government had hoped for."For the past ten years Shirley Phillips has noticed nursing care spiralling downwards. She hopes it hasn't reached a point of no return for the sake of our future and of those compassionate, dedicated nurses who still exist. She is pleased to say there are more of those than the others.