Wendy Burn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Born | 1958 (age 67–68) |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | Southampton Medical School |
| Known for | Old age psychiatry |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Royal College of Psychiatrists University of Leeds High Royds Hospital Royal South Hants Hospital |
Wendy Katherine Burn CBE FRCPsych (born 1958) is a Consultant in Old Age Psychiatry. She was President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists from 2017 to 2020.
Burn was born in Oxford.[1] She decided that she wanted to be a doctor at the age of two. Her parents were both doctors and her mother had been the first in her family to attend university.[2] Whilst at school she joined the St John Ambulance brigade and spent her weekends administering first aid.[1] Her grandfather was Joshua Harold Burn, a pharmacologist at the University of Oxford.[3] She studied medicine at Southampton Medical School and joined the university theatre group. She became interested in punk rock, partied every night and failed her first year of medicine.[3] She managed to turn her academic studies around, and passed the later years of her degree whilst acting as stage manager for the medical school revue at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.[3] In her second year she started a project on people who self-harm, and was surprised by the attitudes of staff to members of her patient groups.[1] She eventually earned a medical degree and specialised in psychiatry.[1] Her first placement was with Guy Edwards at the Southampton Medical School.[3] She finished medical school in 1982 and completed house jobs in medicine and surgery. She worked at Lymington Hospital and Southampton General Hospital.[3] Her medical house job was with Charles George, a clinical pharmacologist who taught her about the importance of understanding the mechanism by which drugs work.[3] In 1983 she started a senior house officer post in the Royal South Hants Hospital and started to work in a Victorian asylum, Knowle Hospital. She unsuccessfully applied to the training programme in psychiatry at Southampton and eventually started a research position with Guy Edwards where she assessed patients on medical wards following self harm.[3] In 1985 she earned her Membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and started her career as a psychiatrist in Leeds. Her first post was at High Royds Hospital, where she worked under the supervision of Richard Mindham and John Wattis.[3]
