I studied medicine in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then moved to North Oxfordshire to undergo training in general practice (family medicine). I then joined a partnership in a large local general practice providing NHS care for around 18,000 patients, where I remained for 27 years.
During that time I trained newly qualified doctors to become GPs and developed extra skills in children and women's health, and skin medicine.
After our four children grew up and sort of left home - most parents will recognise that this isn't a quick process and bits of their lives gradually oozed, like amoebas, from their old home to their respective new and more or less independent ones - I started working as a volunteer expedition medic in my spare time, travelling, among other places, to Kenya, Tanzania, China, Madagascar and, most recently, Transylvania.
I’m on my first assignment with MSF, and I’m going to be a clinical lead at a hospital in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
