Keeping it real
Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer says Holyrood’s baby, Kirsty, and her mum should be seen as people, not patients
By Tom Freeman
▏ IT HAS BEEN JUST OVER a year since Dr Catherine Calderwood stepped into the role of Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO). “I tell people who ask me I’m ‘getting used to it’. Tat’s probably the easiest way to sum it up,” she says. Tere is no sense of missing her former life as an obstetrician, how-
ever, as she is still practising. “I still see pregnant women when I can. It’s not my clinic anymore, but I still have it once a fortnight, on a Friday.” She tells Holyrood she believes she is the only CMO in the UK to
have continued clinical practice after being appointed. It allows her to see first-hand and experience the frustrations of front-line NHS staff. “I was so frustrated trying to get somebody seen in a timely way and I got moved from department to department. Tat was me, the obstetrician, I suppose, if it was me in here, they’d get it sorted. But I did it the same as any doctor would have done, and you know, was passed on, ‘sorry, I don’t have the right rota’, ‘it’s this extension number’ then the number was wrong.” Keeping the two jobs going allows her to experience that frustra- tion, she says.
“Te obstetrician bit is who I am.” 32
www.holyrood.com 23 May 2016
In both her roles, then, Calderwood is the perfect person to be intro- duced to Kirsty, the Holyrood baby. As an obstetrician, she expresses frustration that Kirsty has already been born. Already, she says, Kirsty is “programmed” by her mother, Caley, whether it be smoking, breastfeed- ing or other choices. “If I can give you an example of a woman who is obese when she’s
pregnant, then what happens in the utero environment changes the child’s response to a bad environment. So that child, once born, will have a worse response to all the different risk factors. “A child whose mother has a BMI of 40 when she’s pregnant has five times the risk of dying of a heart attack at the age of 50, so the mother’s womb programmes the child. So even if the child doesn’t smoke or do any of these things, it is still born with the risk, and if the child does go on to smoke etc, those risks are compounded.” Caley is pregnant with Kirsty while the Scottish Government is review- ing its maternity services. Calderwood says it is “a very interesting time”. “If Kirsty has been born into this deprived part of Scotland, then her
mother is in deprived circumstances, and therefore all the effects that has on the baby, by the time she is born, they are already affecting her.” Even if Caley has avoided smoking and alcohol, and isn’t obese, she is far more likely to have a poor diet and low levels of physical activity, she says.
INTERVIEW
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
