SEVENTY years since starting his profession in Maitland, veteran radiographer and third generation local, Barry Crich, says the new hospital is "absolutely amazing".
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"Things here are so far advanced from when I started," Mr Crich said during a tour of the new Maitland Hospital on Thursday.
"We used to wait over half an hour to get a complete picture of an x-ray by the time you developed them and put them through a drier. Today you get instant pictures."
"We used to have to do pin and plates in the theatre. Every time we did one we had to run downstairs, develop it, run upstairs and show them. Sometimes the whole process could take up to five hours."
In 1950, at age 14, Mr Crich said he started working in the old hospital for just over one pound a week.
"I was mostly self-taught and back then there was just the one x-ray room. I used to do about 21 calls a week and they would have to send a taxi around to my house to pick me up."
During his career, Mr Crich said he saw it all. From getting stuck at the hospital for six days during the 1955 floods to helping identify Maitland's headless bodies.
"One of the persons had a broken foot. So to help identify the victim I had to x-ray the body with no head on," he said.
"They then found the head in the river in Newcastle and brought it up for us to x-ray for bullets."
Mr Crich, now 86, said he retired in 2000 having spent his entire career at the old Maitland Hospital.
"I could have become chief at a number of other hospitals in the area but I chose to stay at Maitland with the people I'd worked with my whole life."
Donna Elphick worked with Mr Crich in the mid-nineties, but has known him all her life.
"Barry has an amazing work ethic and is an absolutely beautiful person," Ms Elphick said.
"He was always been so caring to the patients and made them feel really comfortable. It's so important in a hospital to have that extra bit of care when you're not well.
"I now work with Barry's grandson, Marc, who has followed in his grandfather's footsteps and they have a lot of the same traits."
Ms Elphick is a sonographer and radiographer in Maitland and will soon move across to the new hospital.
"We have four x-ray rooms, two CTs and one MRI at the new hospital. We will also have four ultrasound machines and three image intensifiers to be used in theatre."
Mr Crich said he misses the occupation and the mates he used to work with but has found ways to fill in the time since retiring.
"Until the last couple of years I spent a lot of time helping my son in his jewellery shops," he said.
"I do a fair bit of fishing up around Tanilba Bay and Lemontree passage as well."
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