Magda was everything you’d hope a doctor to be
We are very sorry to announce that Magda Smith, who worked at our Trust for more than 25 years, has died.
A gastroenterology consultant, Magda’s last role with us was Chief Medical Officer, helping steer us through the pandemic. She became our ‘expert voice’ and was often featured across local and national media, including her interviews on BBC Radio 4.
Throughout her many leadership roles, she kept up her clinical practice and her patients remained at the heart of everything she did.
Louise Head, Director of Research & Chief Medical Officer Operations, worked with her for many years. She said:
Magda was one of a kind. She could be wonderfully quirky but beneath that was a razor-sharp intellect and an extraordinary understanding of people. She was kind, deeply humane and had a rare ability to connect with others and make them feel understood.
She was everything you would hope a doctor to be. Her patients, many of whom she had cared for over many years, absolutely adored her, and that says more about her than any professional accolade ever could.
Over the 20 years I knew her, what began as a working relationship grew into a real friendship, and I feel very lucky to have known her. She brought so much to the lives of those around her, and she will be remembered with enormous affection.
Magda left BHRUT to join Barts Health as Group Deputy Chief Medical Officer, where she’d started her training more than 40 years earlier. It was only down to a comment from a physics teacher that she ever considered becoming a doctor. She’d planned to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a nurse, until the teacher told her parents she’d make a better doctor!
Our thoughts are with her family, including her two children and with her colleagues who will always fondly remember her.
Dip Mukherjee, Medical Director Patient Safety & Patient Experience, added:
Magda was a dear friend who I’d known since 1998. She contributed so much to BHRUT and will always be part of the folklore of this organisation. May she rest in peace.