RELATIONSHIPS & FAMILY
Kerry helps out family in spare time from her busy job serving needs of 17,000 patients
IT HAS not been a cheery winter for Scotland’s NHS.
While flu and freezing conditions put the health service under severe strain, thousands of staff power on with the day to day job of looking after the nation’s sore backs, sickly babies and chronically ill elderly.
A three-part BBC documentary, The Family Doctors, goes behind the surgery doors at a large general practice in Elgin to show what is involved with delivering primary health care to 17,000 patients in the north-east of Scotland.
It’s an impressive operation, with 70 staff, including six senior GPs, writing 10,000 prescriptions a year. But that brings its own management problems when one of the senior partners wants to take a new job. GPs burn out, they leave the profession before they’re 50 and it takes two years to replace them. Beside the old timers struggling to keep the show on the road, the series features Kerry Cattanach, a newly qualified GP. We see her using a kitchen timer to keep to her 10-minute appointment slots – and getting emotional when her patients have a hard time.
Kerry, 28, is exactly the kind of person the NHS needs. She grew up on a farm in Fochabers, 20 minutes from where she now works. When she’s not seeing patients she’s setting them a good example by running in the woods or whizzing past them on a bike.
She hopes the series will give people more insight into the realities of surgery life than she had.
Kerry said: “It will be interesting for the public to see what actually goes on in the practice. Before I got involved with medicine, I didn’t realise what was involved.
“Before my GP training, I didn’t know how many hours of paperwork I’d have to do a day.”
In fact, Kerry signed up for medical school in Aberdeen with quite hazy
Before my GP training, I didn’t know how many hours of paperwork I’d do in a day