Steve Dorkings -retired biomedical scientist - Sully

Just when I think I am going to give up on trying to put together the Sully story something happens to encourage me to persevere.
Like this email I received from a former scientist who trained at Sully.

Let Steven tell it in his own words:
" I started my career as a Junior Medical Laboratory Technician in Pathology, training to diagnose disease by laboratory methods at Sully Hospital. (The profession is now known as Biomedical Scientists a branch of the many little recognised Healthcare Scientists).

The Pathology department was then quite small unlike the modern automated laboratories of today.

I was there from 1968 to c.1972. I was taught everything from collecting blood on the wards for Haematology to diagnosing TB from sputum examination. There were several trainees, pathology then just on the verge of great breakthroughs, nothing was automated, and made very good friends.

I met and married my wife there, she was a junior nurse who later went onto be involved in ECG. It was a great place to work with the staff all knowing each other by first names from the coal boiler stoker “Ginger” to the hospital superintendant Dr “Bill” Foreman. I was there when heart valve replacement and perfusion was being pioneered. On call for Biochemistry I had to monitor the Na, K and blood gasses of such patients from table to ITU, sometimes on the hour every hour all afternoon and night. In Haematology we had to perform prothrombin and clotting times and cross match blood. In those days X matching 20 pints of blood for a open heart patient through wasnt a bad day!


Despite individual patient sad fortunes it was a great place to work and the staff had a terrific camaraderie and genuinely cared for the patients. Sully put me on a career which I pursued across Wales, Scotland and England contributing to many pathology laboratories in the NHS. I have just retired after 42 years as a biomedical scientist specialising in medical microbiology and can honestly say the years spent at Sully were the best years of my career and equipped me with a passion for my subject, the NHS, its staff and most importantly, the patient. I learnt much more than just the science. Thank you Sully Hospital.
Steve Dorkings CSi, FIBMS, Cert.NHS Man."


And thank you Steve for sharing your story with us.

Before the advent of high tech laboratories guiea pigs were used. If they were lived you knew you were cured.