Professor Cathy Jackson

Cathy is a medical doctor by background and is passionate about removing the barriers to health care education for all potential students whatever their background or starting point. Cathy has spent the last two decades providing medical service in remote and rural areas and cares deeply that the level of health care provision in remote areas is th best that it can possibly be. She has been responsible for the founding of the National Centre for Remote and Rural Medicine in West Cumbria which aims to train health professionals both undergraduate and post graduate from all over the world and provide them with the skills to deliver first class urgent care and health care wherever in the world they might find themselves. In her role as Executive Dean,Cathy works with the school teams to provide innovative solutions to real world health care education needs working closely with regional, national and international stakeholders. The Faculty also looks to identify and meet educational needs in other allied fields and has a number of additional projects which are ongoing. Cathy is always keen to hear from healthcare providers across the globe who have education needs which the Faculty may be able to meet.

Cathy trained as a medical doctor and continued training in general medicine until having family. Due to the ill health of one of her children Cathy retrained as a Primary Care Physician and has mainly worked in rural settings in this role. Following a ten year career gap when Cathy was mainly only able to work from home as a medical writer and research assistant, Cathy applied for a role as Clinical Lecturer to develop a clinical communication skills program for Dundee Medical School. From there her interest in both education and research flourished and she won awards for both teaching and writing. She progressed to Senior Lecturer at Dundee University and was responsible for the Primary Care teaching of the students, during this post she developed the remote and rural education strand placing students in locations throughout remote Scotland. Her work encompassed significant amounts of research in the areas of inflammatory airways disease , medical education and the creation of a genetic resource leading the East Coast " Generation Scotland" recruitment program. Cathy has examined for many Universities both in the UK and overseas at both undergraduate and post graduate level. She has sat on many Regional, National and International committees including for NIHR, HTA, NICE and WHO. She remains committed to working with others to find solutions for providing first class health care to all communities wherever in the world they might be. Having developed a reputation for the development and implementation of courses, Cathy was invited by St Andrews University to develop clinical teaching within their existing program as a twelve month secondment from Dundee University. At the conclusion of this secondment and following the GMC approval of the clinical program , Cathy was invited to apply for a Chair at St Andrews, becoming the first female substantive Clinical Chair in the history of the medical school. At St Andrews Cathy further developed and integrated the clinical program and developed a remote and rural training experience for the students. Having spent several years at St Andrews Cathy was encouraged to apply to UCLan by the exciting challenge of starting a new medical school using an innovative model and designing a new curriculum from scratch.