
Who am I ?
I’m part-time partner in a rural NHS General Practice in Scotland and part-time Clinical Informatician.
Since qualifying as GP from the the Aberdeen GP Vocational Training Scheme at the end of August 2005, I worked for about year in a range of rural, suburban and city centre practices in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, and for a similar length of time based in Glasgow working in the city as well as practices in the surrounding areas of Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, and Argyll. I returned to Aberdeen in August 2007 and completed a sequence of Maternity Locums, before moving to East Lothian in October 2009 to become a GP partner.
I am one of the first graduates from the combined MBBS and PhD programme at the Medical School of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; intercalating a PhD between the pre-clinical and clinical stages of the MBBS course. I completed the distance learning MSc in Healthcare Informatics with the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the University of Bath in December 2010.
From April 2011 to March 2020 I worked on a sessional basis with Scottish Clinical Information Management in Practice, working on a variety of projects including the Emergency Care Summary (ECS), the Key Information Summary, as well as collaborating with other SCIMP members to provide general health informatics advice to NHS Scotland. I have both a formal and practical grounding in Clinical Safety in information technology through work supporting the ongoing management of the ECS and a role on the GP IT change advisory board in NHS National Services Scotland.
In February 2013 I became and GP eHealth Advisor for Scottish Government, becoming part of the Digital Health and Care Directorate in 2017 and being part of the team supporting the work of the External Expert Panel to the 2018 Digital Health and Care Strategy. Since 2018, I became GP Clinical Lead in Digital Health and Care at Scottish Government. I provide both technical and domain expert advice to this directorate and other parts of Scottish Government and played a role in cohort identification for both COVID19 pandemic and also other vaccination transformation work in NHS Scotland.
I am a member of the Health Informatics Group of the Royal College of General Practitioners and a Member of the British Computer Society acting as chair of the Primary Health Care Specialst Group.