A nurse who has served the Goulburn community for more than four decades has hung up her hat and retired.
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On August 10 Alena Ward celebrated her last day as a community nurse with co-workers and friends by her side. She had been a nurse for more than 41 years.
Ms Ward started nursing in February 1979 under the guidance of Matron Ros Noakes and Sister Marleen Eggleston at the Springfield Nursing Home. The old building has now been demolished to make way for the hospital development.
Ms Ward said she had originally wanted to be a high school maths teacher but her father "didn't believe in education for girls".
"I had to do something where I trained and learnt at the same time, and that was nursing," she said.
Ms Ward said she loved her father very much and his views reflected "the way it was those days".
The nurse's penchant for numbers ended up helping her career.
"I'm the one that thinks outside the square," she said.
The dedicated woman spent the majority of her years as a community nurse and an audiometrist. She founded the Southern NSWLHS Outreach Aboriginal Otitis Media Program in 2001. The program has been running for almost 20 years.
Ms Ward suffered "ear infection after ear infection" as a child. She said her understanding and lived experience made her a good nurse.
Ms Ward said nursing had changed significantly since the start of her career.
"It's faster," she said.
"When I was younger we'd do a lot of the basic showers and dressings and simple things now its very high tech, very high powered.
"It's a different business."
The kind woman was one of the original district nurses in the region.
Ms Ward said the most challenging aspect of nursing was the exhaustion.
"[Nurses] get up and when we get to work we're driving, we're negotiating, liaising with patients and working in a multidisciplinary team," she said.
"It's very very busy.
"We go home very tired and I often cook on the weekends so I have meals I can heat up at the end of the day."
Ms Ward worked full time and raised two children as a single parent.
She now plans to move to Queensland to be with her partner and will work casually as an aged care ACAT assessor.
Aged care has always been a passion for the nurse. She recently undertook extra training for the job.
She said the most rewarding aspect of her career was the skills and knowledge gained to "keep [her] own parents out of nursing homes".
Ms Ward took eight months carers leave to look after her elderly parents before they died.
She said this set her up "to know from the carers perspective what's helpful".
Ms Ward said throughout her four decades working she always "put the effort in and gave it the best I could".
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