KRISHAN
Punam

• 1. Career

Punam Krishan is a Scottish doctor, TV personality, and author. Born in Glasgow, she married Sandesh Gulhane and took a post at a medical partnership but left after burning out and became a locum general practitioner (GP).

She has presented the BBC Scotland series Laid Bare, appeared on Morning Live and The Weakest Link, and written a Glasgow Times medical column and children's book. In 2024, she placed eleventh on the twenty-second series of Strictly Come Dancing with her professional dance partner Gorka Márquez.

Career

Punam Krishan was born 28 May 1983 in Glasgow, and grew up in a small tenement flat with her younger sister and extended family. Her father owned a corner shop. Her parents moved from Kapurthala in Punjab to Scotland in the late 1970s, where they had an arranged marriage. Punam has stated that she was "raised in equal parts on curry and Irn-Bru" and that education was important to her family, with her parents taking the view that she was either going to become a "doctor, lawyer, accountant, or a failure".

Krishan went to Hillhead Primary School, Notre Dame High School, and the University of Glasgow, where she studied medicine for ten years. She failed her third-year exams the first time round and had to retake them. In 2011, she married Sandesh Gulhane, another doctor, who went on to become a Member of the Scottish Parliament and the health spokesman for the Scottish Conservative Party. She spent six years working as a general practitioner before burning out and taking a post as a locum (a substitute for a physician).

In January 2019, Krishan went viral after tweeting an exchange between her practice's receptionist and a racist patient. That October, Krishan began presenting Laid Bare for BBC Scotland, in which patients were given a comprehensive medical check-up and then interrogated by Krishan. Writing that month, Susan Swarbrick described her interrogations as "a living post-mortem". During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, Krishan wrote for the Glasgow Times each week about health and her experiences as a doctor.