SHORT REPORT |
Why I became an occupational physician ...
Department of Public Health, University of Oxford, Old Road Campus, Oxford OX3 7LF, UK
Email: kate.venables{at}dphpc.ox.ac.uk
Like others writing in this series, my move into occupational medicine was a change from my original career direction and I have never regretted it. My work has always been varied, interesting and challenging and I relish the opportunities it provides to look at work, workplaces, law, government and all sorts of areas which other medical careers never penetrate.
In the late 1970s, I was making my way up the respiratory medicine career ladder as a medical registrar but had become indefinably dissatisfied. When I failed to get one particular job that I had set my heart on I looked around for alternatives. I brainstormed with any one who would listen and found a welcome from occupational medicine. I was impressed that senior physicians in the Society of Occupational Medicine and the Faculty of Occupational Medicine were prepared to spend time talking to me. The Medical Women's Federation directed me to Suzette Gauvain whose advice, to get on to an occupational medicine senior registrar rotation, I disregarded. Instead I spent a year as a full-time MSc student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and thought that I might go back to respiratory medicine.
Once on the LSHTM Occupational Medicine course in 1979–80, I was bowled over by Corbett McDonald's epidemiology teaching and decided that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my professional life. I found it logical and intellectually satisfying. I also enjoyed being at the inception of disease, with the opportunity of obtaining information which would help to prevent disease. I did my MSc dissertation on the epidemiological detection of occupational asthma with Tony Newman Taylor at the Brompton Hospital, which gave me my first taste of research. After the MSc course, I was offered two complementary jobs, one at LSHTM and one at the Brompton. These gave me tremendous opportunities to carry out research, postgraduate teaching, specialist clinical work and editorial and advisory work. I never moved back to respiratory medicine and have since moved further towards the mainstream of occupational medicine by applying epidemiological principles to research on service provision in occupational health.
In retrospect, I may have been primed by experience of occupational lung diseases as a registrar and by reading Raymond Parkes' wonderful book on occupational lung disorders. My undergraduate experience may also have influenced me: Pat Lawther gave enthralling lectures about occupational diseases and environmental pollution and invited students to his outpatient clinic, from whence they returned with tales of detective work to find out the cause of patients' symptoms. Although we saw it as exotica—rather on a par with the forensic medicine lectures—it is interesting to reflect that we probably had more face to face teaching time on occupational medicine at Barts in the 1960s and 1970s than most UK medical students do today. But the welcome I received from senior members of the specialty as a mere registrar and the high quality of the LSHTM MSc course were undoubtedly the main factors in my decision.
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