Poverty Can Kill and Now I Can Prove It Scotland's New Chief Medical Officer, Harry Burns, Explains His Discovery: The Link Between Being Poor and Cell Malfunction Scotland's New Chief Medical Officer, Harry Burns, Explains His Discovery: The Link Between Being Poor and Cell Malfunction Face to Face

Summary

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WHEN you ask Harry Burns if , in trying to sort out illness, he sometimes wonders whether he might be more effective as a surgeon than as a guru of public health, he answers without hesitation in that quiet, priest-like voice: "No, absolutely not. I started my career as a surgeon and every day going into the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow I would see in patients the end results of a lifetime of deprivation, and it used to infuriate me that we just accepted that."

The imperative to change that situation convinced Burns, Scotland's newly-appointed chief medical officer, that medicine must engage with politics. "I could never be a politician but I recognised early on, I suppose, that in order to make a difference, not just to one life but as many as possible, I had to work through politicians."

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Extract

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Poverty Can Kill and Now I Can Prove It Scotland's New Chief Medical Officer, Harry Burns, Explains His Discovery: The Link Between Being Poor and Cell Malfunction Scotland's New Chief Medical Officer, Harry Burns, Explains His Discovery: The Link Between Being Poor and Cell Malfunction Face to Face

To that end, Burns moved into the public-health sector in the early 1990s and quickly became known far beyond his native Glasgow for his candour and insights into the link between living conditions and health.

During his last year as public health director for Greater Glasgow NHS, he was responsible for creating the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, a group of specialists from various medical disciplines which is focusing on what Burns calls "the biology of ...

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