THE first Filipino nurses who came to Gwent as part of a recruitment drive are celebrating their 15th anniversary living in the UK.

In 2011, 60 nurses came from the Philippines to work for Aneurin Bevan University Health Board as part of a hiring scheme across Wales.

They were the first cohort of Filipino nurses to come to Gwent.

Forty of the were employed at the Royal Gwent Hospital, with another twenty sent to Nevill Hall hospital, Abergavenny.

On July 4 this year, 15 years after their arrival in Gwent, a special event will take place at the Parkway Hotel and Spa in Cwmbran to commemorate their experiences and memories.

The nurses will be joined by some of their mentors and former bosses, as well as the coordinators who supported them in their first year of settling into Wales.

They said they wanted to celebrate the memorable event in gratitude of all the support they had received.

Novelita Alzate, a theatre nurse from Newport, has helped organise the event.

She arrived at the Royal Gwent in 2001, aged 29.

Now working as a nurse with pioneering robotic surgeries in Cardiff, she said: “We would like to see all these people who helped us.

“It was the first time they had recruited nurses from the Philippines, so we were learning from them and they were learning from us.

“It was such a good support from them. They were really good in telling us how life in the UK would be and what to expect when we came over here.

“We are a big community now, quite a close community now and we like to have these gatherings.”

Ms Alzate had a baby daughter and was waiting for a visa to go to the United States shortly before she went for the job in Gwent.

She said: “I had a little one and it was a hard decision. She was just six months when we were interviewed.”

Her daughter, now 16, joined her in the UK six months after the move. Ms Alzate's husband also lives here.

She called it one of the “best decisions” she had made.