MY Consultant - Dr Cath Livingstone | Blog posts

Dr Cath Livingstone is a consultant who recently joined the Trust family in November 2022. Dr Livingstone has travelled the country sharing her expertise and has taken time to share with us her story…

Hello, my name is Dr Cath Livingstone, I am a newly recruited consultant at The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust. I have a passion for helping patients receive the best care possible and this I believe includes building a relationship from the offset. To do this, I wanted to share with you a little bit about my life and career in the NHS.

I grew up in North Yorkshire and studied medicine at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) University of Cambridge. I did most of my training in East Anglia before starting my first consultant post in 1999 at the Luton & Dunstable NHS Trust, where I worked for 5 years.

In 2003, I joined the Army Reserve as a Consultant Specialist, and still serve in this role. I was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as ICU Lead as well as having helped to run many training exercises. In 2017 I was fortunate to be awarded the MBE for my service, especially my work in military training and education. A proud moment in my career!

In 2004, I married my husband and we embarked on an adventure to the Scottish Borders, a place I have grown to love as I still live here to date, on a small farm with my husband David, my cat Mordechai, Border collie Joe, Labrador Ted, pigs Sophie and Sylvia and sheep Spike and Bounce. We used to breed sheep and pigs but are currently just renting out most of our land.

Whilst living in the borders I worked as a consultant at Borders General Hospital up until 2019. I thoroughly enjoyed this role as I got to see the difference between the providing care in a rural area in comparison to my previous experiences in highly populated cities.

After leaving this post, I worked as a locum in various hospitals, developing my interest in remote and rural anaesthesia, which began because of my military deployments. Remote and Rural hospitals are usually very geographically isolated, without the range of specialists and facilities that even a DGH would usually have. This required a much broader scope of practice from those who work there: for example, in the places where I work, there are no paediatric specialists so if an unwell baby or child needs treatment, the anaesthetists take on this duty. I really enjoy the challenges presented by this work, which is such a contrast to the general trend towards increasing specialisation.

I first came to work at Pinderfields as a locum consultant in September 2020. I worked at The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust as a locum, mainly on ICU, throughout some of the worst periods of the Covid pandemic and was so impressed by how supportive and cohesive the team was. I spent most of the next two and a half years doing more stints as a locum in between my spells working in the Falkland Islands and Orkney.

I thoroughly enjoyed working with the anaesthetic team at the Trust, so much so that I decided to apply for a substantive consultant post on an annualised contract which allows me to continue with my remote and rural work.

The anaesthetic department made me feel welcome from day one and I felt genuinely valued by the Trust.

I was also very pleased that The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust was prepared to offer me the flexible contract that I wanted, so I can continue with my other commitments. I’m looking forward to using my experience and areas of expertise to help the department develop to meet new challenges, especially in sustainability and in medical training.

I am eager to continue my journey with Mid Yorkshire and hope to meet some of you on the way!