Philippa Whitford is a Scottish National Party politician and surgeon. She was first elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Central Ayrshire in May 2015 and was re-elected at the 2017 general election. She is the SNP Health spokesperson in the House of Commons. Whitford worked as a consultant breast surgeon at Crosshouse Hospital for more than eighteen years. Just after the First Gulf War and during the First Palestinian Intifada at the age of thirty, Whitford served for a year and a half as a medical volunteer in a UN hospital in Gaza. She spent the 2016 parliamentary recess travelling to the West Bank to operate on four women suffering from breast cancer, and visited the Gaza Strip to advise local hospitals on how to improve healthcare. She has been a medical volunteer in a UN hospital in Gaza and also spent time in Southern Lebanon doing project planning for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. Upon returning to Scotland, she led the development of Scottish Breast Cancer standards to raise the quality of care across Scotland. Philippa is currently the Shadow SNP Westminster Group Leader for Health and has made championing the core principles of the NHS one of her central mandates. She has been a strong advocate for better team work and a more open approach to reporting incidents as well as better health standards and reducing the privatisation of health services.