Highland women open the first private menopause clinic in the city centre.
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00:00 Hi there, I'm Dr Emma Rushworth. I'm an NHS GP here, but also a GP with a special interest
00:10 in menopause and I'm one of the doctors that helped set up Menopause Health Highland Clinic
00:15 here in Inverness. I'm Beth McFarlane. I'm just retired from
00:20 being a GP partner in the practice, in the caring medical practice, but my interest has
00:25 always been women's health, so I've done a lot of women's health through my career and
00:29 then developed an interest in menopause and as I was coming towards the end of my career,
00:34 Emma and I were discussing setting up a clinic that we could provide for women and we came
00:40 up with the idea of Menopause Health Highland. Naturally, being a female GP in any general
00:45 practice, you see a lot of women and do a lot of women's health, so your experience
00:50 and learning kind of builds over the years. And then towards this latter sort of few years,
00:55 working with Beth, she was obviously developing her interest in the menopause and training
00:59 as a British Menopause Society specialist and I thought, "Hmm, this is really interesting."
01:06 And I've been very lucky to have some working in a practice with somebody like Beth said,
01:11 it's quite hard to train in this area, so I've been really lucky and my interest has
01:18 just grown and grown. So Beth and I were quite aware that we kept seeing these women that
01:23 were coming into the practice who were maybe for whatever reasons, sometimes to do with
01:30 long waiting times, sometimes their own reasons, going to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, sometimes
01:36 clinics in England, via video link, these sorts of things, to get some more specialist
01:42 advice and spending quite a lot of money and travel expenses and it's all these things
01:48 that are linked in with it. And that's where the seed kind of started to get planted that
01:53 we don't really have anything like that up here and we cover this massive geographical
01:58 area, some of it quite rural as well, you know. So I started to say to Beth, "What do
02:05 you think about maybe looking at a clinic where it's just pure menopause and being able
02:11 to offer women that choice and those services if they want?" And then it just kind of, that's
02:16 where it grew from, wasn't it, when we kind of looked into it. I think covering the area
02:20 that we cover, I think we do see a lot of women who literally, some of it is that they
02:27 just want to see someone face to face because GP services are, like every service in the
02:32 NHS, are under such pressure at the moment. So sometimes we are seeing local women whose
02:37 GPs are doing a great job but they just want a bit more time, which is what we can provide.
02:42 My question to you guys is why do you think there is a lack of funding and research and
02:49 services available for people going through menopause? I've seen it so much from coming
02:53 from England to Scotland. It's either too populated and they need, you know, it's too
02:59 much on the NHS. And this is nothing, you know, a dig at the NHS. They're doing as much
03:03 as they can. It's nothing to do with that. But there is, after speaking to so many other
03:08 medical professionals as well, it's that there is a lack of funding, a lack of research
03:13 and knowledge on menopause in a general setting. Why do you think that is?
03:20 I think there's a lot of reasons for it. I think from a GP point of view, you know, GPs
03:27 are generalists and thankfully for all of us, the knowledge and awareness in general
03:36 medical practice is increasing all the time. But when there's a new change in a speciality,
03:41 say there's a new heart drug, GPs have to learn about that so they know what they're
03:45 doing. And so the difficulty for GPs is they're learning every new advance for every speciality
03:52 and menopause is one of those specialities. And so for every GP to know everything about
03:58 every speciality is really difficult. And, you know, I think there's been a lot in the
04:02 media recently about the fact that there is no specific teaching in medical school about
04:08 menopause. And I think the voices like yours and a lot of celebrities are going to help
04:15 advance that. Yeah, I think it's really important.
04:18 Yeah, absolutely. And I think that will make a difference. But GPs catching up, they're
04:23 having to do a lot of that learning in their own time, aren't they?
04:26 Yeah. It's really tough. And that's kind of what
04:29 we've been talking about is that it's not their fault. It's that, you know, it does
04:34 need to be introduced. They need to be given that time.
04:37 Absolutely. They shouldn't have to do it all the time
04:40 in their spare time and playing catch up with things, you know, using their initiative 24/7.
04:45 A good job is, as I can imagine, incredibly hard as it is.
04:50 That's right. So yeah, definitely. I feel like having that
04:52 support for them to be able to give the support to patients is really important.
04:58 That's one area. I think then the specialist services, you know, I think there have been
05:03 advances. You know, I think there's been a government directive in Scotland that every
05:08 health board area has to have a specialist in menopause. And that's new in the last couple
05:13 of years that I'm aware of. And that has happened. But of course, especially if you look at Highlands,
05:19 one specialist to provide the care for, you know, yeah, it's...
05:23 The North area. We're almost fighting the tide, you know,
05:27 because the previous generation just didn't talk about it. And so we're trying to get it spoken
05:31 about. Your generation are the ones that are going to bring it out and spoken. And the more we talk
05:35 about it, the more normal it becomes. It stops being a diagnosis. It just becomes part of the
05:42 life cycle. Yeah, definitely.
05:43 But you know, every woman's journey is individual to them. And so that change in life cycle will
05:49 happen when it's going to happen for them.