Hello, I'm Dr. Louise Newsome and welcome to my podcast. I'm a GP and menopause specialist and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Wellbeing Centre here in Stratford-Bron-Avon. I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity and the Menopause support app called Balance.

On the podcast, I will be joined each week by an exciting guest to help provide evidence-based

information and advice about both the perimenopause and the

menopause. So today on the podcast, I want to welcome you Dr. Claire Kay, who I've been

emailing for a while and like many of my guests have never met in real life but I'm

meeting on the screen for the first time today and like me she's a GP but like me she's not a

GP anymore so I'm going to hear a bit about what she does and let's see where the conversation

goes so hi Claire welcome today hi thanks for having me so you trained as a general practitioner. Yes, so I was a doctor

for about nearly 20 years and I was a GP and I did, as you would imagine, lots of women's health

and I did also lots of mental health, but I particularly had a special interest as well around frailty.

So a lot of what I was doing was

talking to people and spending time with people. And I really found that after a period of time

that I was starting to develop this sort of sense of really enjoying the consultation and

spending time with people. And I realized that actually that for me was one of the big things

I got a lot of enjoyment, motivation from. So I gave up clinical medicine about five years ago, maybe a bit more.

And I became a qualified executive career coach. And I specialize in career development and

also perimenopause and menopause in the workplace. So helping women to thrive in the workplace during that period in their life.

Really interesting, isn't it?

And I don't know about you, I'm sure I'm older than you,

but when I was at medical school in the 80s and 90s,

I didn't get any training about the consultation.

It was all about, well, the preclinical

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