Patricia Buckfield

Patricia Marie Buckfield (20 August 1934 – 13 June 1995) was a New Zealand paediatrician and neonatologist. A pioneer of neonatal intensive care in New Zealand, she contributed to the early development of what became the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (known as the Dunedin Study).

Early life and education Buckfield was born in Surrey, England, on 20 August 1934. Her family moved to New Zealand in the early 1950s, settling in Southland, and Buckfield was educated as a boarder at St Margaret's College, Christchurch, where she was head prefect of Acland House in 1952. Buckfield collected perinatal data on approximately 12,000 births at Dunedin's Queen Mary Hospital between 1967 and 1973. In 1973, she and educational psychologist Phil Silva conducted a pilot study, funded by the Medical Research Council, assessing 250 children at four or five.

In 1982, Buckfield moved to Wellington as director of the Puketiro Centre and continued her work in developmental paediatrics until her death from cancer on 13 June 1995, at the age of 60. She had been elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1983 and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1985.