H1N1 pandemic puts spotlight on Corner Brook’s Faith Stratton CORNER BROOK CLIFF WELLS The Western Star

Faith Stratton’s job as chief medical officer of health has thrust her into the spotlight recently due to the H1N1 outbreak. — Telegram photo

Growing up in Corner Brook, Faith Stratton remembers always wanting to be a doctor.

In 1974 she fulfilled that dream after graduating from Memorial University of Newfoundland’s medical school in 1972 and completing a residency after which she took a job as a relief doctor.

From that start, her career took her to the top job in public health in the province — chief medical officer of health.

That job has thrust her into the spotlight recently with daily updates from the Confederation Building on the status of H1N1 vaccination delivery and the toll the illness has taken in this province.

The current H1N1 pandemic is not her first brush with wide-spread illness.

In her early years living in the Herald Avenue area, she went to school at Broadway Public School, roughly where the former Canadian Tire building is now. Around 1959, when she was about 10 years old the schools in the Corner Brook, including Broadway Public, didn’t open until October because of a polio epidemic.

“It’s kind of like what we’re going through now,” Stratton said. “Parents were afraid to let their kids go to a party or go swimming.”

When she grew up
Whenever she was asked as a child “What are you going to be when you grow up?” She always answered “a doctor.”

She kept reinforcing that choice in her my mind when the question came up.

A legitimate career choice for women at the time was “getting married” but that wasn’t in her DNA. Her mother ran a store in the Broadway area and her grandmother ran a general store in Glovertown.

“My female ancestors all had careers, so maybe it was a bit of genetics there, too,” she said.

She thought it was a fairly straight road to becoming chief medical officer of health while she was travelling it, but now she realizes there were more than a few obstacles she had to overcome.

From her point of view at the time, the first was getting into medical school, then finding funding for it.

Once she left medical school and residency behind, she took a job as a locum physician, relieving doctors for up to three months at a stretch in cottage hospitals across the island.

Bonne Bay Cottage Hospital was her first stop, but after a couple of years living out of a car she set up her own practice in St. John’s. About two years after that she wanted to move into preventing disease, rather than reacting to it.

After a two-year federal epidemiology program landed her a job as director of family planning for the Department of Health. When Dr. David Severs retired as the chief medical health officer in 1986 she took up the challenge.

While medicine’s biggest achievements — clean water, good sewage disposal and vaccinations — are part of public health, it isn’t the glamourous side of medicine.

“When it’s working well you don’t see it,” she said. “You don’t see polio any more, you don’t see measles any more, you don’t see smallpox, you don’t see a lot of things because those things are being prevented. Tuberculosis is being prevented for the most part, so the new doctors now won’t ever see a case of that.”

In the case of the H1N1 pandemic, it’s about the most intense she’s had to face. The high number of cases in the short amount of time are adding up to a lot of work.

There are diseases having a bigger world impact that are unfolding over longer periods of time, notably west Nile virus and HIV.

“It’s (H1N1 pandemic) the most activity at one time with more people affected and more kinds of professions involved,” she said.