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Royal College award

…for psychologist Karyn McCluskey. Ella Rhodes reports.

11 June 2018

Forensic psychologist and CEO of Community Justice Scotland Karyn McCluskey received the 2018 Presidents Medal from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow in June. Over the last 13 years she has worked extensively with the police, helped establish Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit and is a member of the WHO Violence Prevention Alliance.

McCluskey also played an instrumental role in the establishment of Navigator, a collaboration between the Violence Reduction Unit Scotland and charity Medics Against Violence, whose members visit schools to speak to children about violence and injury. The project supports ‘Navigators’ who work between the emergency departments of two of Scotland’s busiest hospitals in Glasgow and Edinburgh and their surrounding communities and aims to help stop repeated presentations of violent injury in hospitals.

The Royal College’s President, Professor David Galloway, said: ‘Karyn McCluskey has made a transformative impact on public health in Scotland though her leadership and ground-breaking work to reduce violence. The Navigator programme, which she helped establish, has been described by one senior consultant as “possibly the most valuable non-medical change in the management of A&E in the whole course of my career”. This Presidents Medal is in recognition of this work and its impact in the community locally, nationally and internationally.’