Celebrating 70 NHS Heroes for 70 Years: 'I am delighted that the MRI scanner has helped to save so many lives'

On the sixth and final day of the series, we pay tribute to the final ten 'heroes' making up our list of 70.  

John Mallard (left) and students

SCANNING technology is now a routine part of diagnosing and monitoring diseases such as cancer in the NHS and around the world.

But it was the pioneering work of Professor John Mallard and his team of medical physicists in Aberdeen that revolutionised healthcare and made magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) a reality.

The development of the world's first MRI body scan in 1980 was hailed at the time as the biggest breakthrough in medical diagnostics since the discovery of X-rays in 1895.

John Mallard

The first ever patient to undergo a full-body MRI was an elderly man from the fishing town of Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire. The scan, carried out on August 28 1980, detected the tumours on his liver that would eventually claim his life.

The device had been developed and built by a team of researchers at Aberdeen University, led by Professor Mallard, who was then head of the medical physics department.

MRI is now used all over the world today in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, dementia, a wide range of benign conditions, as well as sports injuries.

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Speaking in 2016 as the prototype MRI prepared to go on display at the National Museum of Scotland, Prof Mallard - now 90 - spoke of his pride that the technology had made such a big impact on patients' lives.

He said: “I am delighted that the MRI scanner has helped to save so many lives over the years.

“It was a team of many scientists who helped to create the first one, it didn’t all come from me.”

Prof Mallard was also one of the pioneers of positron emission topography (PET) scanning and in his inaugural lecture shortly after joining Aberdeen University in 1965, he predicted PET scanning would become one of the most powerful tools for studying human diseases.

Although the technology was in its infancy, Prof Mallard brought Scotland's first ever PET scan device to Aberdeen after leading a national fundraising campaign to pay for a building next to Woodend Hospital to house a second hand scanner which he had negotiated from researchers in London.

This building was later replaced by the John Mallard Scottish Pet Centre at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, until recently Scotland's only PET centre, where cancer patients from across the country were referred for scans.

John Forsythe

ORGAN transplant surgery has evolved hugely since the UK’s first kidney transplant was performed in Edinburgh in 1960.

A record number of Scots received a life-changing organ transplant in 2016-17, with 348 people undergoing surgery.

The number of donors increased too, up to 133 from 99 the previous year.

Much the service’s progress in modern times has been under the leadership of Professor John Forsythe, Scotland’s lead transplant surgeon and Medical Director for Organ Donation and Transplant at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.

Born in Northern Ireland, he began working in transplantation in 1991 when he was appointed as a consultant surgeon with special interest at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. He transferred to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in 1995.

As Clinical Director of the Edinburgh Transplant Unit he oversaw significant development and innovation in renal, pancreas and liver transplant surgery.

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In 2007 the Edinburgh transplant unit took part in the first paired kidney transplant in the UK, and carried out Scotland’s first live liver transplant the following year when a young Ayrshire woman donated half of her liver to her husband in a ten hour operation.

Mr Forsythe was appointed as national lead transplant surgeon in 2009 in recognition of his commitment to advancing the cause of transplantation in Scotland.

He was made an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh in 2015.

As well as taking the lead role in the service, he has been involved in ensuring public awareness of the benefits of organ transplant. He has aided in the creation of an education pack for all secondary schools in Scotland, and raised the issue of organ donor shortages.

He has also taken a leading role in highlighting changes in the organisation of organ retrieval, a new allocation system for kidney transplantation in the UK, paired exchange kidney transplantation and live donor liver transplantation.

He has held a number of professional positions of responsibility including Chairman of the Kidney Pancreas Advisory Group (UKT) and President of the British Transplantation Society.

He is currently Associate Medical Director for Organ Donation and Transplantation at NHS Blood and Transplant.

Fiona MacLeod

FIONA MacLeod helps children comes to terms with disfigurements that can leave them feeling isolated and anxious.

As Scotland's only Changing Faces Practitioner, Ms MacLeod provides help, advice and support to youngsters through the paediatric psychology service based at the Royal Children's Hospital in Glasgow.

It accepts referrals from children with a range of conditions such as eczema, burns, scars, birth marks, acne or craniofacial distortions such as Apert syndrome, where skull bones fuse together

Ms MacLeod's role is to help patients build their self-esteem and confidence in dealing with complex medical difficulties, as well as the pressures of looking different and how to deal with other people's reactions.

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She said: “Around half of children with a disfigurement have experienced bullying which can have a devastating effect on their lives affecting their mental health and wellbeing.

“My role is to offer psychosocial support to children, young people and their families in dealing with the complex medical and psychosocial difficulties they face with respect to the appearance of the child or young person.

“Seeing the resilience that many of these children have facing difficulties and managing their conditions, which can impact greatly on their everyday lives, is inspiring and I am privileged to be part of their journey.”

Willie Shields

Willie Shields, 71, is an estates engineer at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary

He could have retired years ago, yet every day 71-year-old Willie Shields gets out of bed and makes his way to Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary to help prepare theatre instruments and equipment.

It’s been a way of life for 50 years. He joined the NHS in 1967, when matrons ruled the wards and the service was still not far from its first flush of youth. He has barely missed a day since.

“Retire? I suppose I have plans to retire sometime,” he laughs, “but I’m probably too frightened. I keep thinking ‘what will I do with myself?’.

“Besides, I just like the job, it’s interesting and every day is different.”

Willie, of Gilmerton in Edinburgh, is responsible for sterilising and disinfecting hospital equipment – a behind the scenes yet vital role when it comes to patient care.

“I started off working for the National Coal Board but I had a young family and the shifts were awful,” he recalls. “My dad worked for the NHS at the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital in Edinburgh, he was there during the polio outbreak when there were patients in iron lungs, and my older brother and my sister were nursing officers too.

“Back when I started the matron was like the queen, everyone knew who she was and gave her respect. Now there are lots of different managers who don’t always have experience of what happens on the wards or at the bedside.”

He says he understands what it’s like to be on both sides of the NHS. “I suffered a triple aneurysm in my groin in 2006. I ‘died’ two or three times and ended up with 39 stitches across my stomach. The blood clot went down my leg and they were talking about taking my lower leg off.

“I got through and first thing I said was I’m going to retire. But who wants to spend all day watching daytime television?

“So… here I am.”

Sir Alexander Fleming

ALTHOUGH he died just seven years after the NHS came into being, it is hard to imagine a modern health service anywhere in the world without the contribution of Sir Alexander Fleming.

Famed for the discovering Penicillin, the world's first antibiotic substance, he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most important people of the 20th Century and knighted for his scientific achievements in 1944.

Born in Darvel, Ayrshire in 1881, but brought up in London, the young Fleming enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington in 1903, graduating with distinction in 1906.

He went on to become assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy and immunology, and served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War.

While there he submitted a paper to the Lancet revealing that antiseptics were killing more soldiers than infections alone by exacerbating deep wound injuries.

In 1928, the famously untidy scientist discovered Penicillin by accident after returning from a family holiday to find his cultures of the bacteria staphylococci stacked on a bench in a corner of his laboratory.

One culture was contaminated with a fungus of the colonies of staphylococci immediately surrounding the fungus had been destroyed.

He grew the mould in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. In 1929, he named it Penicillin.

Despite being one of the greatest breakthroughs in medicine, Fleming eventually abandoned efforts to mass produce Penicillin in 1940 after finding the antibiotic agent too difficult to isolate.

The endeavour was taken up by Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford instead, funded by the US and British governments. They started mass production after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and Penicillin has gone on to save millions of lives worldwide.

Sir Alexander Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, along with Florey and Chain, in 1945. He died in 1955.

Sir Boyd Orr (Image: Archive)

THE NHS was in its infancy when Sir John Boyd Orr was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949 for his work on malnutrition and hunger.

Born in Kilmaurs, Ayrshire, in 1880, he first trained as a schoolteacher before going to university to study biology and medicine.

After graduating he worked as a ship's surgeon on a ship trading between Scotland and West Africa, then as a locum GP in Saltcoats, Ayrshire, but eventually abandoned medicine for a career in nutrition research.

He was appointed director of a new institute of animal nutrition at Aberdeen University in 1913 before heading to France on a medical commission during the First World War.

He spent much of his time in shell holes, patching up the many wounded, and also made arrangements for the battalion's diet to be supplemented by vegetables collected from local deserted gardens and fields.

He returned to Aberdeen in 1919 and raised the funds to build the Rowett Institute, where he led pioneering studies in the nutrition of farm animals and human populations.

In the 1920s, his focus changed to human nutrition both as a researcher and an active lobbyist and propagandist for improving people's diets.

His research found that adding milk to the diets of British children led to increases in the children’s weight and height.

In 1936, he gained fame with the publication of 'Food, Health and Income', a report showing that the cost of a diet fulfilling basic nutritional requirements was beyond the means of half the British population and that 10 per cent of the population was undernourished.

This and other reports conducted by the Rowett Research Institute formed the basis of the British food-rationing system during the Second World War.

He became the first Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation from 1945 to 1948, where he developed a proposal for a World Food Board that would tackle hunger by facilitating the transfer of surplus food from food-exporting countries to food-deprived countries. Although rejected, the proposal won him the Nobel Prize.

He died in 1971.

Margo Christie

MARGO Christie joined the NHS in 1976 as a Student Nurse in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

She said: "I chose nursing as a career because I wanted to work with and care for a wide range of people. I was attracted to the practical aspect of nursing within a dynamic environment and to the many varied pathways that would be open to me as a Registered Nurse.

"Throughout my 42 years in the NHS I have held a number of posts within the delivery of hands-on care in Acute and Community settings. I progressed in my career within management posts where I led a number of new initiatives and later became an Associate Nurse Director.

My chosen career has more than met my expectations in terms of personal development and job satisfaction. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of the 42 years."

Most recently, Ms Christie has held the post of Project Advisor for the new Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary.

She said: "Perhaps the greatest opportunity of all came in the last 5 years. During this time I was the Clinical Lead for the design, build and migration to our new district general hospital in Dumfries and Galloway.

"Working with a wide range of stakeholders from the private and public sector at a strategic, managerial and operational level to ensure best outcome for patients and their families was both challenging and exciting."

Angela Wallace

PROFESSOR Angela Wallace has dedicated her nursing career to the NHS in Scotland for more than 20 years.

Following extensive critical care charge nurse experience in Glasgow, she moved from her clinical specialist role, gaining her MBA.

She quickly progressed through senior nurse posts, which included Senior Nurse Manager across a large medical, intermediate care, rehabilitation and care of older people directorate, and was then appointed Deputy Director of Nursing in NHS Fife.

In late 2002, Ms Wallace came to NHS Forth Valley as Interim, and then Director of Nursing within the Acute Operating Division.

She was appointed Nurse Director for NHS Forth Valley in 2004, and is the professional head of Nursing and Midwifery.

In addition she has a particular focus on Improving Patient Care, Safety and Experience and the involvement of patients in this work.

Angela is Executive Lead for Spiritual Care with NHS Forth Valley.

In December 2008 Angela was made an Honorary Professor in recognition for the development of Nursing and Midwifery and Improving Patient Experience by Stirling University, Department of Nursing.

Malcolm Daniel

THE Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) has been hailed as a world-class blueprint for driving up patient safety since it launched a decade ago.

Staff at the country's largest health board, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, have been the driving force behind many healthcare innovation projects as part of the safety programme.

Prior to SPSP, global evidence suggested nearly 1 in 10 patients admitted to a hospital would be unintentionally harmed and that more than 40 per cent of these incidents could have been avoided.

However, significant changes in the way staff at Glasgow Royal Infirmary (GRI) and hospitals across the Clyde sector have delivered significant benefits for patients.

Dr Malcolm Daniel, a consultant in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at the GRI, led the critical care improvement work in the GRI’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) which has experienced a dramatic reduction in infections as a result.

Dr Daniel said: “The SPSP programme’s quality improvement methodology helped us to drive forward the changes we wanted in place to help patients.

“We tested – and made lots of changes – to the way we worked. As part of these changes we reduced the rate of some key hospital acquired infections. Our rate of central line blood stream infections was already so low that we were in the top 10 per cent of ICUs internationally for prevention.

However, we’ve gone from four infections every three months to more than three years between infections.

“Our delivery of care has improved which has led to better patient health and shorter stays in ICU.

"Before we started SPSP the ICU at GRI was often full with one in every six patients referred to us being transferred to a hospital with an available ICU bed.

“Within one year of SPSP starting, our average length of stay had reduced, a bed was more likely to be available, and the number of patients requiring to be transferred to an ICU bed in another hospital was less than one in every 30 referrals.”

Sir Duguld Baird

FEW families have made such a significant a contribution to the NHS in Scotland as the Bairds.

In 2020, NHS Grampian will open the new Baird Family Hospital in honour of Sir Duguld and Lady Matilda Baird and two of their children, Joyce and David.

The facility, adjacent Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital, will encompass maternity, gynaecology, breast screening and breast surgery services, as well as a neonatal unit, centre for reproductive medicine, an operating theatre suite and research and teaching facilities.

Sir Dugald was born in Greenock and studied medicine at Glasgow University, where he graduated in 1922.

As a student and young doctor in Glasgow he saw the effects of poverty on mothers and babies and this influenced his lifelong interest in social and economic factors in health and disease.

In 1937 he was appointed Regius Professor of Midwifery in Aberdeen and spent the next three decades shaping policy on reproductive health, perinatal and maternal mortality, social obstetrics and cervical screening.

He and Lady Baird, also a physician, established the first free family planning clinic in Aberdeen.

In 1951 he started the Aberdeen Maternity and Neonatal Databank, which continues today, linking all obstetric and fertility-related events in women from a defined population.

Sir Dugald formally retired in 1965 and died in 1986; Lady Baird died in 1983.

Their daughter, Joyce Baird, also became a internationally acclaimed physician and scientist specialising in diabetes at the Western General in Edinburgh. She founded the hospital's Metabolic Unit based on her vision of integrating patient care with research into the treatment and prevention of diabetes and other endocrine disorders. She died in 2014, aged 85.

Their son, Professor David Tennent Baird, 82, held the chair of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Edinburgh University and has served as a expert in human reproductive biology for the World Health Organisation.

He developed antiprogesterone pills which are used worldwide for contraception, as well as treatment of diseases such as fibroids.