1 COMPASSIONATE and dedicated, Dr Margaret Kerr’s work in Glasgow saved the lives of hundreds of premature babies. The consultant paediatrician at what was then the Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill was a leading light in neo-natal medicine. She once said in an interview with the Evening Times: “I love babies – we are no longer just saving life but producing healthy future citizens. That gives us all pride and pleasure.”

Glasgow Times: Dr Margaret Kerr

2 Dr Kerr qualified in medicine in Glasgow in 1948. She did a two-year internship at the then Southern General Hospital (now the QEUH) and a further two years at the Sick Kids, before being posted to Rottenrow Maternity Hospital for a year that turned into 12.

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3 Frustrated by the NHS’s inability to purchase much-needed intensive care equipment Dr Kerr took matters into her own hands and set up the Friends of the Babies fundraising group. Within its first 18 months it had raised £5000 through a variety of activities.

4 Dr Kerr researched the use of hyperbaric oxygen in the 1960s and piloted the Paediatric Department of the Queen Mother’s Hospital through the 1960s and 1970s, retiring in 1983. She was a founder member of the British Association of Perinatal Medicine, with John McLaurin who ran the neonatal unit at the Royal Maternity Hospital, and Forrester Cockburn who, after he moved from Edinburgh, shared consultant advice with Kerr at the Queen Mother’s Hospital. In 1994 she piloted the UK’s first Bubble Surfactometer to monitor infants with severe respiratory problems as part of her research in intensive care and respiratory physiology at Glasgow University’s Child Health Department.

5 Dr Kerr was named the Evening Times Scotswoman of the Year in 1982. She died in March, 2010.