MANY people who reach the grand old age of 100 have the health service to thank for it, but Wynne McKay spent a large part of her life making the NHS what it is today.

The Oxford-born widow who is 100 years old today, helped set up the first computer systems at the NHS, which allowed doctors and nurses to treat patients more efficiently.

She has also experienced plenty of change in the city where she was born in 1914 and has lived through two world wars and four monarchs.

She said: “I am very fortunate to have lived so long and I am quite happy in my old age.

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“I am very lucky to be at this age and still be in such good health.”

Mrs McKay was born Wynne Jarvis in Cowley Road and moved with her family to St Giles when she was 11, to live above her parents’ pub, The Pheasant, which was opposite St Giles Church.

Shortly before the Second World War broke out in 1939 she was called up to join the army but ended up working in the health service, later helping to develop a groundbreaking computer system for the NHS.

Now living in Frilford Heath, near Abingdon, she said: “I had a significant ear operation when I was 19 and I lost my ear on my right side, so I did not pass a medical.

“They could not put me in factories because it would damage my hearing so I was put into hospital work at the old Radcliffe Infirmary.”

Oxford Mail:

  • The Radcliffe Infirmary in June 1964

She was then chosen to take part in a project to develop a set of questions and assessments that would be used by doctors treating patients in what was to become the NHS.

This pro forma could then be stored on computers, making it easier to treat patients across the service, an extremely advanced development for the time.

Mrs McKay, who was married to William McKay from 1939 until his death in 1958, kept working with the NHS computer systems until she retired in 1975. They didn’t have children. She has lived in Frilford ever since and said Oxford had changed completely since her youth.

Oxford Mail:

  • The building in 1959

She said: “Oxford was a different place altogether before the war because students had rules and regulations they had to live by.

“But after the war, by the time students came to Oxford they were 23 or 24 years old and they had been in the army and maybe even had wives.

“You couldn’t tell them what to do, that they couldn’t take a girl into their room or have a car. Oxford is 100 per cent different from what it used to be.”

 

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