Clare Gerada on HIV care in the early 1980s
Apr 22, 01:27 PM
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Clare Gerada trained as a psychiatrist and then a GP, working in South London. She was the first female Chair of the RCGP and later president. She was interviewed in August 2022.
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“I qualified in ‘83 and I can vividly remember seeing the first patient with AIDS, as I was a casualty officer and at the time it was a little bit like we imagine with Ebola now: you almost had to close the entire department if somebody came in with AIDS. And when I started in Psychiatry HIV infection had moved from men who had sex with men to the intravenous drug-using population and estimates of up to 40, 50 even 80% of drug users were thought to be infected with HIV. So, it really was a crisis, and these patients were having to wait 18 months, two years, for treatment. So, I set up as a very junior psychiatrist what I called an Outreach Barefoot Doctor service in one of the needle exchanges. So, I used to take my little doctor's bag with blood-taking machines, some specula so I could do cervical screening on women, some dressings and some basic medicines and – it’d probably be illegal to do this now, probably CQC would have shut me down! But I used to provide very basic Primary Care Services to intravenous drug users and try to get them plugged into general practice and I did that, and I then started seeing drug users and it continued for the next 30 years. So that was my first example of working in a pandemic.
00:01:42.830 --> 00:03:14.360
“I qualified in ‘83 and I can vividly remember seeing the first patient with AIDS, as I was a casualty officer and at the time it was a little bit like we imagine with Ebola now: you almost had to close the entire department if somebody came in with AIDS. And when I started in Psychiatry HIV infection had moved from men who had sex with men to the intravenous drug-using population and estimates of up to 40, 50 even 80% of drug users were thought to be infected with HIV. So, it really was a crisis, and these patients were having to wait 18 months, two years, for treatment. So, I set up as a very junior psychiatrist what I called an Outreach Barefoot Doctor service in one of the needle exchanges. So, I used to take my little doctor's bag with blood-taking machines, some specula so I could do cervical screening on women, some dressings and some basic medicines and – it’d probably be illegal to do this now, probably CQC would have shut me down! But I used to provide very basic Primary Care Services to intravenous drug users and try to get them plugged into general practice and I did that, and I then started seeing drug users and it continued for the next 30 years. So that was my first example of working in a pandemic.