Interview By Bruce Oxley
The BDA’s new director for Scotland Pat Kilpatrick describes her journey from trainee manager in the NHS to her new post
Rising to the challenge
D
espite a career that has afforded her great experi- ence of the inner workings of the NHS across the whole of the UK, the BDA’s new
director for Scotland acknowledges that her new role is unlike anything she has ever done before. Born and raised in Paisley, Pat studied modern history and political science at Dundee University before joining the NHS graduate management training scheme in ı979. The two-year training programme took
her to Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee but her first role after the scheme was at Yorkhill Children’s Hospital. From there she worked in Tayside before moving to Argyll and Clyde and then Forth Valley, where she took on the role of hospital manager at the Stirling Royal Infirmary. Her next role was at the University
of Stirling where she was taken on as a research fellow, and subsequently senior lecturer, spending the next six years setting up an MBA programme for doctors and dentists in association with the BMA. Pat then moved on to join the Scottish Government as a policy advisor in what was her biggest exposure to primary care – including primary care dentistry – so far. She led the national task force on the development of primary care trusts (PCTs) in Scotland, which brought about the introduction of PCTs. The outcome of the taskforce was the government white paper in ı996 called Designed to Care.
22 Scottish Dental magazine
Pat explained: “It was a very chal- lenging role because primary care had never really worked in organisations before. They had all been independent of each other and now they were being organised into primary care trusts who would manage them and their services on a grander scale. So that was a big change for them.” The changes involved included to the
budgets, so where previously services were funded on a practice level, they were now going to be funded through PCTs. Pat continued: “So that was a big change and there was a lot of opposition within the professions and within the NHS generally. “It was quite an interesting job though
and I had an all-Scotland remit. My job was to make sure every health board was ready for the changes and we put a lot of organisational development money into promoting and helping the changes to take place.” After her role with the Scottish
Government, Pat was appointed as the director of clinical service development at Argyll and Clyde. She said: “It was my job to improve and develop services, introduce quality initiatives and recon- figure services. “It was a politically contentious
job, lots of public consultation, lots of political opposition, lots of public involvement – trying to help the public understand why these changes would help provide a better service, rather than a reduced service.”
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