About Me

My name is Beth Routledge.

I am a junior doctor, working and training in the many and varied hospitals across the west of Scotland. I graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2012, and spent the first parts of my postgraduate career in the Foundation Programme and Core Medical Training. I’m now a medical registrar and higher specialist trainee in Acute Medicine, which is a specialty that combines all the things I love best about medicine. You can find out a little more about that here and here.

I came to medical school via a biomedical sciences degree that I’ve never used, and various jobs in call centres and university residence wardening that turned out to be the best possible training for junior doctoring.

I grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. I fell in love with Glasgow when I got off the train to come to my interview for medical school in 2007, and I have called it home more or less ever since. I identify as a naturalised Glaswegian — or, having discovered a few years ago as a doctor in the old Southern General Hospital that I was working in the same building that my great great grandmother was born in, perhaps an inevitable one.

The photographs in my header show some parts of the west of Scotland of which I’m especially fond. The bridges of Glasgow looking west down the Clyde as I ran along it one night, the sun rising over the Glasgow skyline as seen from the sixth floor of one of the city’s hospitals at the end of a nightshift, and the sun setting over the sea at Largs while eating fish and chips on the beach on the first real day of spring. It is the best place in the world.

I describe myself as a mover, shaker, and thurible-wielder in the Scottish Episcopal Church. The accomplishment outside of medicine of which I am actually most proud is my ability to thurible while walking backwards, although that’s not what I said to my last interview panel. I have been described as a liturgical pyromaniac. I basically think all churches should have one of these.

I work and worship in St Mary’s Cathedral, an open, inclusive, and welcoming congregation in the west end of Glasgow. I am a member of the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and am passionate about involving the Church in issues of social justice and human rights. As convenor of Changing Attitude Scotland, I was involved in the campaign for marriage equality in the Scottish Episcopal Church which was accomplished in June 2017, and before that the campaign for marriage equality in Scotland itself.

I am a stupendously slow distance runner, and completed my first and so far only marathon in Brighton in 2015. I have plans for more.

I am a choral singer with the City of Glasgow Chorus. We perform an eclectic repertoire of choral works in venues around Scotland, and in recent years we have gone on the road to Poland and China.

I live with two cats and many books on the south side of Glasgow. I run on enthusiasm and Radio 4.

I can also be found on Twitter.

---

The Legal Fine Print
As per Good Medical Practice 2013. All patient encounters referred to have been anonymised, fictionalised, and composited in order to preserve patient confidentiality. I do not intend anything I have written to be taken as medical advice, nor do I give medical advice over the Internet. I write under my own name and will provide my GMC number on request.  I blog in a personal capacity and I do not presume to speak for any organisation that I work for or for anyone other than myself.