Dr Brian Kidd

Dr Brian Kidd graduated from Edinburgh University Medical School in 1985 and trained as a GP in inner city Edinburgh before moving to psychiatry – training in South Glasgow and then the South West region of England. He returned to Scotland as a Consultant Psychiatrist in addiction psychiatry in NHS Forth Valley in 1996 (becoming Lead Clinician for all Specialist Community Services in the Forth Valley Primary Care Trust in 1998). He moved on to a split NHS/academic post in 2003 and until May 2018 was Lead Clinician for the NHS Tayside Substance Misuse Services and Senior Lecturer in Addiction Psychiatry in the University of Dundee Medical School. His main academic interest has been the clinical outcomes achieved in the treatment of opiate dependency, work that formed the basis of his doctoral thesis, accepted in 2013. Dr Kidd has commissioned services as chair of the Dundee City Drug and Alcohol Action Team (2005-8) and was deputy Chair of the Scottish Association of Alcohol and Drug Action Teams (SAADAT). He has advised the Scottish Government on drug policy since 1998 – first as a member of the Scottish Advisory Committee on Drug Misuse (from 1998) and from 2010 until 2015 he was the independent Chair of the Scottish Drug Strategy Delivery Commission, leading the group which produced the Independent Expert Review of Opioid Replacement Therapies in Scotland in 2013. He represented the Scottish Chief Medical Officer in the working group developing the UK National Treatment Guidelines published in 2007 and was invited to be a member of the group updating these guidelines for publication in 2017 – Chairing the group addressing opioid substitution therapies. In 2016, he was invited to become a special advisor to the Scottish Government on drug policy. He has remained a front line clinician until his retirement in May 2018 and was voted “Doctor of the Year” in the Scottish NHS Awards, 2007.