Hopefully this will help them out over Christmas with the elderly and the flu

Aileen Gamble

She will work as a nursing auxiliary or ward assistant.

Miss Gamble said: "The publicity said you only needed to work two hours a week and I thought they must be really desperate and that made me think I ought to do something.

"If they are happy for people to work just two hours a week, I thought I could offer them half a day.

"Hopefully this will help them out over Christmas with the elderly and the flu."

Long career

Miss Gamble at the start of her long career

Miss Gamble, from Wigston, Leicester, began her nurse training at the Royal Infirmary in 1942.

She spent most of her career as a health visitor until originally retiring 20 years ago.

But she missed the job so much she returned part-time at Blaby Hospital in Leicester, finally retiring six years ago for what she thought was for good after 52 years service.

Maria McAuley, nurse recruitment and retention manager at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, said she was delighted by Miss Gamble's offer to return to work.

She said: "I would like to put her in a nursing auxiliary role or as a ward assistant because she has got valuable knowledge and experience.

"She will be supporting the trained nurses, so she will be doing things like taking temperatures and blood pressure, filling in charts. The kind of work which frees up time for those trained staff."

There is no age limit in nursing, although if workers are out of the profession for more than five years they must complete a return to practice course.

Nursing unions have warned that the NHS still faces a serious staffing shortage despite government attempts to woo more people to nursing by increasing pay and giving nurses more powers.

A spokeswoman for the Royal College of Nursing welcomed Miss Gamble's decision.

She said: "We have got to value every single nurse who returns to the NHS, and if she has got the skills and is fit and healthy enough to do the job then we see no reason why she should not."

The spokeswoman said record numbers of nurses were joining the profession, and many people were being tempted back.

But she said there was still a problem retaining existing staff.

"Many nurses are fed up with the pressure they are under and simply not being able to give patients the care that they want to."

She estimated that there were 20,000 NHS nursing vacancies across the UK.