An MSP will this week return to frontline nursing to vaccinate people against coronavirus.
Emma Harper, who worked at Dumfries Royal Infirmary before she was elected, has joined one of the teams putting Scotland’s immunisation programme into action.
She said: “It’s a really positive experience because you feel you are contributing to something that will benefit people.
“It’s a huge logistical operation but it’s so engaging and uplifting. The team I have been working with are so positive and happy to be there in the clinic, working hard to protect people.
“The vaccine teams will all be trained and ready to go and it feels like there is some good news at last after everything that has been happening.”
Harper has been a registered nurse for 30 years in Scotland and in the US, where she worked in theatre at the famous Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles, known as “Hollywood’s hospital”.
She was elected as an MSP for South Scotland for the SNP in 2016.
When Covid first hit Scotland, Harper volunteered to return to the wards but as she has Type 1 diabetes, she was categorised as too high risk to be deployed.
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Instead, she volunteered on a helpline to help those struggling with mental health issues and loneliness.
She said: “It was frustrating to not be on the wards. I felt I had a lot of skill to offer. I am used to high pressure and working long hours in full PPE in an operating theatre but I made use of myself with volunteering.”
The MSP wasn’t going to miss another chance when the NHS called and asked her to enlist in the vaccination roll-out.
Harper went through intensive training and has already administered vaccines as well as having it herself.
She said: “I had no fear of it. In my work as an MSP I have been following the development of the vaccine, the trials and the intensive scientific efforts. I would suggest people ask questions if they have fears but I would encourage anyone who is offered the vaccine to take it.
“The whole team are so professional and supportive and reassuring to anyone who is worried.”
Harper grew up on a dairy farm near the village of Lochans, south of Stranraer. She and her three sisters all became nurses.
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She said: “We grew up in an environment where it was about caring, for the family and for the animals and because of my diabetes, there was a lot of medical contact and nursing seemed a natural progression for me.”
Harper’s nursing career took her to California in 1990 to work at Cedars-Sinai, where Steven Spielberg paid for a research wing. Frank Sinatra died there and Madonna had a hernia operation.
Harper once walked out of a lift to find Hollywood greats Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, whose wife Annette Bening was giving birth.
The Scot was part of the team treating a Braveheart cast member for a sword fight injury and remembers OJ Simpson coming in, handcuffed to a gurney, after the infamous police car chase in 1994.
The hospital also treated victims of gun and knife crime.
Harper said: “There were so many innocent victims of drive-by shootings. I remember one 13-year-old girl came in who had been shot as she sat watching TV.
“Sometimes we would have five gunshot victims in a night. There was massive blood loss and it could be very difficult to deal but you had to stay objective and calm.”
After 14 years, Harper returned to Scotland with her American husband, Robertson.
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She worked at Dumfries Royal Infirmary as a recovery room and theatre nurse and then clinical educator before the independence vote drew her into politics.
She said: “There were a lot of transferable skills I had which were relevant to becoming a politician. Nursing is about listening, engaging and supporting.”
Now, she knows the best contribution she can make to the health of the nation is administering the vaccine.
She said: “People have been struggling. For people who have been shielding, high risk or just stuck at home and worrying, to be able to deliver a vaccine, is a privilege.”