About the Author
About me...
Rob Niven qualified from St Andrews and Manchester Universities in Medicine in the 1980’s. His subsequent career largely developed in Manchester with a brief sojourn in Leicester. He was appointed Consultant at Wythenshawe Hospital (later University Hospital of South Manchester) as a specialist in Occupational and Respiratory Medicine, but immediately set up the first Severe Asthma Clinic in the North West (UK). He pioneered multiple centre engagement and alongside willing local colleagues, developed a Regional Severe Asthma Network, which later became a model for Specialist Services nationally.
Severe Asthma took over as both his clinical and academic focus and contributed to a number of medical innovations and assisted the development of understanding of diagnostic challenges of airways disease and breathing disorders. He finished his career with over 150 scientific papers, including several innovations to his name.
He later worked with SIGN and the British Thoracic Society in driving modernisation of the National Guidelines for the Management of Asthma.
The Covid pandemic, blocked a planned part-time retirement and after nearly 18 months working at the acute end, he decided full retirement and an amateur career as an author was a safer option. Safer perhaps, not from his own health concerns, but from a growing frustration at the (political) management and waste within the NHS. Specifically, he despised the loss of the individual patient and ethos of the delivery of quality care, as being the underpinning mantra in the modern era.
Life on the Isle of Arran is undeniably serene and idyllic by comparison and whilst he has no plans to become rich and famous from his writing, he hopes the few that read his dyslexic prose, will laugh and cry at times, at the close to life, fictional story of Jamie Carmichael. The series is inspired by the books of Colin Douglas, which are still hilarious to read today and whilst the stories and characters in the ‘A Life of Breath’ series are purely fictional, they are based on a skeleton of his own career and events, patients and colleagues who made a life as a physician fighting breathlessness, a thing of joy!