There is a plaque to a Forester with a great national reputation at the Cinderford triangle. It is a memorial to Muriel Powell, not a familiar name to most local people now, particularly those from outside Cinderford. But Dame Muriel was a leading figure at the birth of the national health service, and she was instrumental in modernising the nursing profession.

She was born in Cinderford in 1914, and moved to London to become a nurse at St Georges Hospital, rising to become matron ay the remarkably early age of 33, overseeing the transition to the NHS the following year.

In those days, nurses led a heavily disciplined and regimented life. Dame Muriel’s predecessor. Their uncomfortable starched constricting uniforms, their lack of control of their brief leisure time and the rigorously enforced rituals of the nursing day, which included patient rounds that started at 3.30am were relics of Victorian domestic service that survived into modern times.

Dame Muriel initiated a more democratic and professional regime for nurses. Under her visionary management, ward management became more patient focussed, nurses were no longer glorified domestic maids but properly trained and respected health care professionals, and nurse education gradually became accepted as an accredited subject for study in higher education, up to university degree level and beyond. There is a Dame Muriel Powell Professor at Kingston University today.

Dame Muriel’s pioneering work was acknowledged with the award of the DBE in 1968, and the following year she was appointed Chief Nursing Officer for Scotland.

Alas, soon after this appointment, she began gradually to exhibit the erratic behaviour associated with Alzheimer’s disease, and she retired to the Forest, to live in Newnham and dying at the age of 64 in 1978.

In my recent frequent visits to the new Cinderford Hospital I have noticed the less formal but more professional work ethos of the medical staff, initiated by the work and imagination of Cinderford’s nursing pioneer, Dame Muriel Powell.