GENERATIONS of nurses trained over seven decades will reunite next month.

The Radcliffe Guild of Nurses will celebrate its 90th anniversary and expects to attract more than 150 alumni from the former Radcliffe School of Nursing.

Members of the nursing society, some of whom have been practising in Oxfordshire for more than 40 years, will visit the site of the Radcliffe Infirmary, where many of the nurses spent their formative years and large parts of their careers.

The infirmary closed in 2007 and was redeveloped by Oxford University.

The 152 members of the guild will return to the former hospital, opened in 1770, to relive their training.

Guild secretary Xante Cummings said she was “very excited” for the 90th anniversary celebrations on June 20.

The 61-year-old graduated from the school in 1976, and since then has worked as a nurse in Oxfordshire her whole life.

The grandmother-of-two, now a nurse at a care home in Abingdon, said that members of the society had been at the forefront of modern nursing.

She said: “There’s been a lot of changes in the way nursing works, but you have to move with the times.

“There are some incredibly interesting people who were members, one of the guild was the first nurse to administer an intra-muscular injection of penicillin.”

Since the first meeting of 22 student nurses on June 16, 1925, the guild has met every year.

Mrs Cummings said: “We have about 500 members now, all scattered across the world and the country.

“It’s going to be a big event in June, more than a quarter of our members will be coming.

“[The guild] keeps older nurses connected and provides them with somewhere to come and see old colleagues.”

Two of the nurses attending are 90.

Over the course of the years, the guild developed and now helps support student nurses at Oxford Brookes, which took over the training of nurses in the 1990s.

After former tutor Anne Harrold left the guild an endowment in 1992, the Anne Harrold Trust was established to support student nurses with grants for additional research projects.

Mrs Harrold was the tutor for the Radcliffe School of Nursing for nearly 30 years and retired in the late 1980s.

At least £64,000 has been given to 32 students since the trust was established.

This year, members of the trust will hold a ceremony at Somerville College where they will hear from speakers, including Oxford’s famous crime writer Colin Dexter.

The 84-year-old creator of Inspector Morse has previously attended the event.