THEY graduated 30 years ago as nurses, but their lives have taken them in as diverse directions as the courtroom and American academia.
Tonight, the graduates from the class of 1988 at what was then known as Glasgow Polytechnic - now Glasgow Caledonian University - will be reunited to share the lessons of their own careers with today’s nursing students.
For many, it is the first time they will have seen each other since completing their nursing degrees three decades ago at a time when university-educated nurses were still considered an oddity.
It is also believed to be the first major class reunion organised at the university since it first launched its four-year BA (Hons) course in 1977.
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Catherine Stock, from Bridge of Weir in Renfrewshire, has undergone one of the most radical career trajectories since her first job as a general surgical nurse at the now-demolished Western Infirmary in Glasgow.
After periods in Nottingham and as a ward Sister in the neurosurgery department at the old Southern General in Glasgow - “that still stands out as one of my favourite jobs” - she headed to London, where she ended up as a clinical director for surgery and critical care, before finally leaving the NHS in 2000 for a new career as a barrister.
“I was able to do a conversion law degree in a year - which was hell - and then I went to Bar School, and then I ended up obtaining Pupillage,” said Ms Stock, now 52. “It’s really difficult to get pupillage - only something like 30% of people get it - but I ended up in a large criminal chambers so I did criminal prosecution and defence for about 10 years. Then in the last four-five years I’ve diversified a little bit into mainly defending healthcare professionals before their regulator.”
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Today, she is joint a partner in London-based Kings View Chambers juggling anything from 50 to 60 cases at once.
The bulk of her work involves defending healthcare professionals in fitness to practise tribunals, including Scottish nurses and midwives whose cases are heard at the Nursing and Midwifery Council headquarters in Edinburgh.
“I feel as if I’ve come back full circle,”, said Ms Stock. “It’s nice to try to help nurses and doctors that find themselves for whatever reason in some sort of difficulty.
“I think what is always surprising to me is that there is always a story behind how someone ends up where they are, and it’s not always as black and white as people think. A lot of the time people are a victim of their own circumstances.”
The class of 1988 had around 20 graduates. Also among them was Jane Houston, whose subsequent career in midwifery has seen her deliver thousands of babies not only in Scotland but in Zimbabwe, New Zealand, North America and Haiti.
Originally from Jordanhill in Glasgow, Dr Houston’s first job was as a staff nurse in ward 8C at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow before going on to study midwifery at the city’s Eastern College.
With a shortage of midwife jobs available in Scotland in when she completed her training 1992, she headed first to Zimbabwe and then New Zealand, where she went on to become the lead midwife for labour and delivery at Wellington Hospital.
In 1996 she moved to Gainsville, Florida where - due to a bizarre historical legacy - she had to revert from midwifery back to nursing.
“I didn’t realise that midwives really are not very common in the United States,” said Dr Houston. “Only about 15% of births are with a midwife. Midwifery was made illegal about 100 years ago. Doctors took over all the births because they said the standards were so low that midwives shouldn’t exist, so we’re still recovering from that.”
She went on to complete a Masters degree in midwifery at Florida University - eventually becoming the first midwife employed at North Florida Regional Hospital - and later completed a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree, which enabled her to begin teaching.
She is now clinical director for the Midwifery and Women’s Health programme at Frontier Nursing University, an online university which grew out of eastern Kentucky’s landmark Frontier Nursing Service - a model coincidentally inspired by maternity care in Scotland.
Dr Houston, 52, said: “The actual nursing service was started by a woman called Mary Breckinridge. She was the first American nurse to train as a midwife and came to London in the 1930s.
"She was really interested in how nursing and midwifery were integrated together, so she actually came up to the Western Isles and was escorted around the Highlands and Islands by this physician, and visited Lewis and Harris. She took the stuff she saw there back to eastern Kentucky.”
Dr Houston, who is now a fellow of the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM), said her career would not have been possible without her original nursing degree.
“That was pivotal for me,” she said. “In the 1980s it wasn’t a thing - nurses had diplomas, they did not go to university - but it really made my career a success as a nurse and a midwife. It would never have been the same without my Glasgow Tech education.”
Although the first nursing degree in Scotland launched at Edinburgh University in 1960, a university education did not become a requirement for another 50 years and was still unusual in 1988.
Another of the graduates who will address GCU’s current crop of student nurses tonight - Ann Gow - said this reinforced a sense of camaraderie and confidence for their future careers.
Ms Gow, 51, from Lochwinnoch, became Scotland’s first nurse consultant in 2000 and who is now the director of Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals at Healthcare Improvement Scotland.
She said: “You could go to the student union and stuff, but you knew your experiences were different because of what you were exposed to working on the wards.
"You weren’t the same at the other 18-year-old students because you were dealing with people who had been bereaved, patients at the end of life, and things that other teenagers just wouldn’t be exposed to.
“But you weren’t really the same as other student nurses either because you were at university for a good bit of the year. We were a small close-knit group though, and that probably made us a bit more resilient than people coming through other programmes. That sets you up for the rest of your career.”
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