About LHSA

Amy Cawood, LHSA Manager - Amy.Cawood@ed.ac.uk

My role includes the management of the LHSA team, strategic and operational planning, budget and future service development. One of my main responsibilities is to work with our funders and stakeholders, especially NHS Lothian, to ensure that LHSA services are responsive to current and future needs whilst ensuring that collections remain accessible to as wide a range of audiences and researchers as possible.

I am interested in how we use our collections to explore the impact the changing climate has had on health and health care and how we ensure that our collections, and particularly how we manage them, remain sustainable. I chair the Heritage Collections Sustainability Group, established to heighten awareness of the consequences of climate and environmental emergencies across our wider department. The group plays a coordinating role for sustainability initiatives and activities across the department.

Louise Williams, LHSA Archivist - Louise.Williams@ed.ac.uk

I oversee the day-to-day running of the archive. As this implies, my role is really varied! I answer enquiries from the public (specialising in queries around sensitive and/or confidential information), organise and run teaching and outreach events, manage the physical and intellectual security of holdings, catalogue and rehouse collections, and take in new material to add to the archive. My work can also involve responding to legal and public inquiries, liaison with partners (including the NHS, University colleagues, and community groups) on specific projects, writing policy and procedure, and devising funding bids.

I’m particularly interested in archives around public health (especially the history of HIV), artwork used in healthcare, the history of psychiatry, and archival case notes. My favourite moments at work are coming across things you might not expect in an archive like ours, from cartoons by psychiatric patients in the 1850s to radical activist magazines.

Louise Neilson, LHSA Access Officer - Louise.Neilson@ed.ac.uk

My role focuses on providing access to LHSA’s collections. This includes handling enquiries, preparing material for researchers to view in our reading room, managing social media content, and developing new audiences through outreach and engagement. 

I am particularly interested in queer archives/queer history and the history of psychiatry and I enjoy using creative approaches to engage people with archives and the history of healthcare.  

LHSA started life in 1967 as the archive for the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. Plans to build a new hospital (which never came to fruition) led to a realisation that the documents that charted the Infirmary’s history back to the early 18th century were squirrelled away in wards, offices, and cupboards across its Lauriston site, at risk of being lost. The Infirmary’s first archivist was Patricia Eaves-Walton, who set about locating and listing this valuable evidence and using it to research the hospital’s eventful past.

In 1974, a reorganisation of the National Health Service led to the expansion of the archive to collect records from other hospitals in our region. When LHSA was founded (originally as the Medical Archive Centre) in partnership with the University of Edinburgh in 1980, the archive’s remit was widened further to include more general records about the history of local healthcare. Originally located in High School Yards, LHSA collections have been located in the Centre for Research Collections in the University’s Main Library building in George Square since 1988.

Under the provisions of the Public Records (Scotland) Act 2011, LHSA is the designated place of deposit for NHS Lothian. This means that records that have been identified as worthy of preservation are transferred from NHS Lothian to LHSA when they are no longer used operationally. LHSA is arguably the largest NHS archive in Britain, extending to over 3,000 metres of shelving. All records cared for by LHSA are owned by NHS Lothian, and certain requests (such as research access to more recent archival records) may be subject to approval by the NHS Lothian Caldicott Guardian.

Read more about NHS Lothian's Caldicott Guardian.

We primarily collect records of long-term legal, administrative, clinical and historical value produced by the NHS within the Lothian area, including those of predecessor bodies. In addition, we also collect non-NHS institutional records and personal papers related to the local history of health care and the history of Scottish medicine. 

Link to LHSA Collection Policy (not yet available)

We are committed to ensuring the long-term conservation, preservation and continued safe access to our historically, socially and medically important collections. 

This is done through both preventive and interventive conservation: 

• Preventive conservation includes providing and maintaining proper storage, monitoring and control of the physical environment
• Interventive conservation involves specific treatments, as required, to address the chemical and physical effects of damage and deterioration, for example, cleaning and paper tear repair

We encourage staff and those who use our collections in the Reading Room to support the long-term care of our collections by ensuring they handle material appropriately and in accordance with our regulations.

Read Heritage Collections' appointment regulations.