In the canteen of the Royal Oldham Hospital, Dawn Lee sits down in her smart blue uniform.
It’s been 32 years since she began her career in the NHS, first starting out as an intensive care and A&E nurse in 1989.
To a patient, those two departments might seem like the most challenging wards in a hospital - places of intense stress and trauma.
But, aged just 24, Dawn, from Failsworth, didn’t mind.
Rather than working in a less pressurised environment for her first job, she asked to be there and wouldn't have had it any other way.
Now, decades on from her first shift, Dawn, now a midwife and manager of the Royal Oldham Hospital's birth centre, takes a break from another busy day at work to reflect on her career.
She's dedicated years of hard work to this hospital.
Even as a woman in her 20s all those years ago, she was never fazed by the challenge of helping people in their most difficult moments.
Dawn understood the work, that’s just the way she was wired.
She's one of the scores of staff members who have dedicated their lives to helping patients at hospitals in Greater Manchester.
READ MORE: Manchester gave birth to 17,000 pandemic babies - this is how midwives made it safer
On Friday, September 30, some of the biggest hospitals in Greater Manchester united under a new banner.
Two of the largest trusts in Greater Manchester - Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust (SRFT) and The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (PAT) - have formally become one single NHS Trust – known as the Northern Care Alliance (NCA) NHS Foundation Trust.
The trust will become one of the largest NHS organisations in the country, employing over 20,000 staff, including Salford Royal Hospital, the Royal Oldham, Rochdale Infirmary, Bury’s Fairfield General, and a host of other local centres.
In recent years, the hospitals have been part of an NHS group.
After being reviewed by the government, that bond has changed.
If the hospitals ‘were living together before’, they are now ‘married’, jokes one of the region’s senior surgeons.
As a new era begins for the hospitals and their staff, the pressures of Covid-19 - and what life looks like beyond the pandemic - are palpable.
Despite their busy schedules during this period of change, several staff members took the time to sit down with the Manchester Evening News to mark the occasion.
Together, these doctors and nurses have more than 100 years of experience within Greater Manchester’s hospitals between them - and a host of extraordinary stories from careers spent treating hundreds of thousands of Mancunians.
They told us about the key moments that shaped their careers.
Monday, May 22, 2017 means many things to the city of Manchester.
The night of the Manchester Arena bombing.
The night of deadliest terror attack in the UK for more than a decade.
The night compelling Mancunians to come together like never before.
Consultant orthopaedic surgeon, Aqeel Bhutta was about to start his shift when he heard news of the attack.
At around 10pm, information of the horror unfolding began to trickle through to his phone.
Calmly, he headed to North Manchester General Hospital, just over three miles from the Arena.
“I was there the night it happened," the surgeon recalls.
"I had worked late anyway and then I got rumblings of news and phone calls.
“The patients were directed everywhere throughout the city. I drove in to North Manchester General as part of the initial team because that hospital is very close by to the Arena and staff were needing support.
“I went to A&E to help triage patients and figure out who needed what most urgently, and to figure out if we needed to send anybody to another unit to share the load.
“We opened two theatres, I was in one and my colleague was in another. Then it was about staggering so the service didn’t stop. There were still the walking wounded to treat as well as those that needed more urgent treatment.
“It’s what we were trained to do and that instinct kicked in. But the sheer number and the level of injury was not something we were used to - it was military level.
“We know about car accidents, we know what to expect. Yet the number, the type of injury - that projectile injury because of the explosion - it wasn’t something we were familiar with.
“But we were brought up to speed very quickly with what we needed to do. And as medics, I’m sure this is true of any emergency service, there is a job to be done, you’re trained to do it, and you need to do it well. That’s the task in hand.”
Mr Bhutta helped to triage the patients urgently needing help, along with other consultants at North Manchester General, and Salford Royal as a major trauma centre taking more patients on the other side of the city.
Then, the surgeon rushed into theatre with his case, whom he spent the next 12 hours with.
Eventually, at around noon on May 23, Mr Bhutta finally returned home.
Only then did the enormity of his night sink in.
“The loss that we had galvanised the city and it certainly galvanised everybody at work,” he continues.
“We knew what we had to do. Anything that had to be done for the care of those patients that were injured and hurt happened.
“From the porters, health care, catering staff - everything makes that system work, and it did. There was almost no 'effort' because everyone was in that single moment, making sure we delivered it.
“It’s only that moment when you switch off and you think, ‘is that what actually happened?’ Or ‘is this what we did?’
“When staff went back home and hugged their family members and their children, it sunk in and, in an instant, people’s lives changed.
“That has stuck with me. That captured the Manchester spirit.”
In 2021, 18 months into a pandemic which has stricken millions, the spectre of death still looms large in these hallways.
Mr Bhutta, a Rochdale native, has seen his surroundings spring into action once again.
“I think there has been a similar attitude with Covid, too,” he adds. “Everyone has to chip in, we’ve all got to do our bit.
“The ability to collaborate over a network patch means that if anywhere in the NCA system has a problem, we can help resolve it.
“But we also feed into a bigger family of Greater Manchester. So if someone needs help in Stockport, we ask how we can support. And likewise, the other way around.
“We’re thinking what can we do that is the best for our patients - but not in just one hospital. Now, it’s the whole north of the city and the wider Greater Manchester area, just like we did with the bombing."
While this surgeon has spent hours operating over the course of the last year-and-a-half, other staffers were sent to work from home - just one of the many tectonic shifts in the last year alone.
The phone buzzes three times as the Royal Oldham's Assistant Directorate Manager, Sandra Wood, is in the hospital's café for half-an-hour. Without hesitation she jumps up to take the calls.
In between her ever-growing list of tasks, she sat down with her sister, cancer services worker Ann Taylor, both from Whitworth, to marvel at the ways their working lives have changed.
The pair of them have worked in supporting roles in the NHS for decades.
Sandra has been in the business for 20 years across Greater Manchester. Ann has worked for a whopping 47 years, the vast majority at Rochdale Infirmary, after taking her first job straight out of school.
"When I first started, people waited years for minor operations, that has changed, they pumped a lot of money in which I was quite glad about," says Ann.
"They were only just about replacing hips, now they're doing shoulder, knees, ankle joints.
"Cancer screening programmes have got so much better - everybody knows that as soon as you catch cancer, the easier it is to treat and potentially cure.
"Obviously things have changed again with the pandemic, there has been a little hiccup with cancer operations but that has now continued.
"I thought I'd seen everything, got the t-shirt, then they said to me 'you're going to be working from home'.
"Beforehand, I would have said that wouldn't work, but we've made it work. In all my career, I have nothing to compare the last year to.
"It's a struggle because you feel like you're not supporting your colleagues, like now the phone is going like crazy. But even when you're not physically there, there's so much you can do," adds Dawn, 55.
"We knew we had to get out of the hospital to make room for more patients, make sure we didn't pass anything on. It was a scary time, but it was the right thing to do."
Ann, 63, shows off her acceptance letter from 1974 - she's aiming for 50 years before retiring, she says with a smile.
"I'll defend the NHS to the hilt. I know it has its problems but what doesn't?
"Through this pandemic it's been life-saving, to know you've got it there, that you can turn up at A&E when you need help and no one is going to ask you for some money."
But while there are those who are coming to the end of their careers in the NHS, there are others who are just beginning.
Last year, 25-year-old Conner Ellison was working in hospitality.
Like employees up and down the country, when the pandemic hit, he lost his job.
Stuck without a wage, he watched as the news became filled with images of hospital staffers with rings around their faces where thick, rigid masks had been pressed for hours; scenes of devastation as patients close to death took their last breaths after battles with a lethal virus sweeping the world.
The picture was and still is, frightening.
But 25-year-old Conner bravely decided he wanted to jump in and help, starting a new job in the biochemistry team at Salford Royal Hospital.
"I'm actually working in the lab," says the Salford-born lad.
"My nana was a community nurse and I saw the work she did - making sure people were getting their tea and had everything they needed - I fell in love with looking after people.
"It was a very strenuous time to join, the heart of the pandemic. It was scary at first, I didn't know what I was getting into. But I wanted something different that would test me.
"Us behind the scenes, we're the people that book in the samples and that's the start of the journey to save someone's life. We're seeing Covid every day in tubes, looking at the lateral flows.
"It takes around 40 seconds to book in a sample, and that 40 seconds can save a life.
"There's so many people that make the NHS work, every day I'm proud of what I do.
"It may have been difficult and daunting at the start but I'm glad I took that leap."
Though she still loves her work at the hospital, so much has changed since Dawn Lee, now 56, first donned her scrubs.
She is now a midwife and manager of the Royal Oldham Hospital's birth centre, filled with state-of-the-art technology which makes the unit a specialist in its field.
Dawn laughs as she remembers that, almost 22 years ago, she was counting down the hours to the Millennium while working on the intensive care unit of North Manchester General.
The nurse was helping fight very real infections, as executives were nervously hovering in the hospitals in wait for the suspected Millennium bug.
For those too young to remember, or too old to care - the Y2K problem saw people around the world fret that computer systems would crash as the time and date ticked over into the year 2000.
Not limited to mere doomsayers, fears were rife that the demise of computers could spell the end of entire industries, with companies spending a fortune on IT consultants to try and avoid a potential glitch.
Today, it seems funny, she says, but on that New Year's Eve, it was a worry.
"On Millennium Eve, the administration staff, the senior people, were all in the hospital that night just in case," Dawn recounts with a smile.
"No one knew what was going to happen, I think everyone thought that when the clock went to naught, everything would stop.
"We were there wondering what would happen with ventilators, what would happen with the clocks, what would happen with everything.
"I presume there must have been some sort of plan, but don't ask me what it was!
"We had emergency generators anyway, we would have always had a backup.
"They were all wandering around like 'we're all here, we're all ready, just in case something happens you know who to call on, the whole hospital is prepared.'
"I assume every hospital was prepared, people were genuinely worried about what would happen at 23.59pm, 1999."
It was fine, of course. And just like hospitals across Greater Manchester today, staff didn't stop to breathe a sigh of relief - there is always work to be done, patients to see, lives to save.
"It got to 0.01am and nothing happened!" Dawn says.
"We drank some non-alcoholic champagne to celebrate, and we just carried on."
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