[6] She was educated at Wood Green: St Angela's Providence Convent Secondary School in London and Douglas Academy in Milngavie, before studying at the University of Glasgow, where she graduated with medical degrees.

[5] 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 United Nations hospital in the Gaza Strip.

[7] She spent the 2016 parliamentary recess travelling to the West Bank to operate on four women suffering from breast cancer, and visited Gaza to advise local hospitals on how to improve healthcare.

She advocated independence as a way of protecting NHS Scotland from the same kind of "creeping privatisation agenda undermining services in England".

"[16] In March 2021 Whitford compared Scotland's position as part of the United Kingdom to a woman "locked" in a room and who had had her cheque book "taken away".

The remarks were condemned as "appalling" by Scottish Labour's Deputy leader Jackie Baillie who said: "There is a constant challenge to ensure that domestic abuse is taken seriously and for the gravity of such offences to be properly recognised, so no one, let alone an MP, should ever trivialise the matter by making such throw away comments which will have deeply offended people.