‘‘She always went that little bit extra,'' Mr Lynes said.
‘‘She had particularly sharp vision . . . often able to detect things that other nurses couldn't,'' he said.
‘‘I don't think she ever missed a day's work all through the years of travelling from here [Coal Creek] to Alexandra.
‘‘She always managed to get there all through the winter, even in ice and snow.
‘‘She was gone every morning and I wouldn't see her home until six o'clock lots of nights and then she would go away again after tea - go and help those children with head lice, because as Heather said, ‘it's no big deal to have head lice'.
‘‘She spent a lot of time combing kids' hair.''
Mrs Lynes resigned from her full-time position as a public health nurse covering the area from Raes Junction to Alexandra on August 8.
The position has now been taken over by Sue Philip, of Alexandra.
Mrs Lynes said one of the most important parts of the job was building up a good rapport with children whose greatest anxiety seemed to be having their ears examined with an otoscope.
‘‘When you approach a child to do anything with their ears they're always fearful,'' Mrs Lynes said.
In the supermarket when she runs across children she has worked with, they have plenty of stories to tell her about their pets and what they have been up to, having built a familiar relationship with her.
She recalls the meningococcal B immunisation and hepatitis B vaccinations and the ‘‘huge logistical exercise'' they were.
Hepatitis B ‘‘catch-up clinics'' were set up in the late 1980s when pre-school children were vaccinated by public health nurses and teams of nurses from Dunedin.
‘‘That was something I wouldn't like to repeat actually, but when you weigh up the outcome of it, that's what you have to do.
‘‘Hepatitis B doesn't affect people quickly - it's an insidious thing, people can have it for years and not realise.
‘‘Then we did Meningococcal B vaccines,'' she said.
‘‘If there was a case in the country, there was a lot of coordinated effort that went into finding anyone they'd had contact with.''
Preschool children were particularly vulnerable to contracting the disease, she said.
‘‘Preschool children put everything in their mouths and they're more susceptible as well.''
She remembers on the last day of one of the school terms how one of the children was infected with meningococcal disease and they had to contact the parents of 60 children who needed to have prescriptions made up for them and to be given instructions about what actions to take.
‘‘All of those children plus all of the adult staff had to be marshalled to get medication to them.
‘‘We couriered stuff down to them - so those sort of things, they require processes to be put in place to be able to run effectively.''
It had not been a ‘‘glamorous position'' and at times it had been ‘‘ frustrating'' trying to help families to find transport to hospital when the family could not afford petrol for their car.
‘‘I think, from a rural perspective it's always difficult for families, especially for low-income families, to be able to get services for children.''
Mrs Lynes was initially the only public health nurse covering Central Otago from Raes Junction and Ranfurly through to Wanaka.
There are now nine rural and five public health nurses in Otago, although not all are full-time.
Vision and hearing technicians are now employed to ‘‘lighten the load'' and contracts are brokered by the management of Public Health South.
A function was held for Mrs Lynes at Dunstan Hospital with staff including those she had worked with from Dunedin.
