Irish Medical Lives

Professor Dorothy Breen , founder of  forDoctors.ie , a unique Irish coaching and mentoring service provided by doctors for doctors, is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Healthcare Management at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where she specialises in leadership, quality improvement and patient safety. Aside from this work, she has been a consultant intensivist and anaesth...

Dr Ide Delargy, a general practitioner in Dublin, has been described by many of her colleagues in all branches of healthcare as truly ‘the loveliest of lifesavers’. A GP Principal in Blackrock, County Dublin, Dr Delargy is Provost and Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners Republic of Ireland Faculty, National GP Co-Ordinator of Addiction Treatment Services with the HSE, former Direct...

Professor Ray Walley   is a general practitioner, academic and medical politician who’s been responsible for ground-breaking advances in Irish healthcare, ranging from the logistics of Covid vaccine delivery and out-of-hours GP cover in Dublin to major High Court settlements, the new Irish GP deal of 2018 and the orchestration of European medical organisations’ opposition to Cannabis leg...

Professor James Bernard Walsh Professor (‘JB’) Bernard Walsh, Clinical Professor in the Department of Medical Gerontology, at Trinity College Dublin, and Honorary Consultant at the Bone Health and Osteoporosis Treatment Unit of the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing at St. James’s Hospital, is one of the outstanding geriatricians of his era. Throughout his training Bernard was greatly influe...

Dr Seamus O’Mahony, retired Consultant Gastroenterologist and Clinical Professor at Cork University Hospital, is the prize-winning author of four highly acclaimed books, the first of which,  The Way We Die Now,  won the British Medical Association’s Council Chair’s Choice award in 2017 . Can Medicine be Cured?  was published in 2019, and  The Ministry of Bodies  in 20...

Dr Declan Kelly, Chief Executive Officer of  Eolas Medical , an innovative healthcare technology company based in Belfast, is a remarkable medical entrepreneur who has - over the course of a half-decade - created one of the most influential clinical information platforms in the English-speaking world. Named after the Irish word for knowledge, the  Eolas  platform was created by Dr K...

Dr John Waterstone, Director of the Waterstone Clinics in Cork, Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford and former President of the Irish Fertility Society, is one of the true pioneers in fertility medicine in Ireland, and currently the most experienced specialist in reproductive medicine in the country. In this episode of Irish Medical Lives, Dr Waterstone recalls his childhood in Kilkenny and Westmeath,...

Considering a career in public health medicine? Or wondering if there’s any point in getting involved in ‘medical politics’? In this episode, Dr Rachel McNamara, a Specialist Registrar in Public Health Medicine, former National Fellow for Innovation with the HSE Spark Innovation Programme and the first female Chair of the Irish Medical Organisations NCHD Committee, discusses the wide range of publ...

What’s it like being a medical student in Dublin these days? And is there more to the Intern Year than exhausting drudgery? In this episode, Dr Maia Springael, a June 2024 medical graduate and Intern at Tallaght University Hospital, explains how French schools differ from those in Ireland, describes the lasting benefits of an early career in artistic gymnastics, and explains how she ‘came out of h...

Are you baffled by conflicting advice about 'bad habits'? Do you really want to live a longer, healthier and more meaningful life? Dr Paddy Barrett, Consultant Cardiologist at Dublin’s Blackrock Clinic, is one of Ireland’s leading experts in lifestyle medicine, online and clinically, with particular emphasis on exercise and ‘aggressive management’ of cardiovascular risks factors, from lipid and bl...

Dr Peter Keenan was Ireland’s first consultant in paediatric emergency medicine. Appointed in 1984, at Temple Street Children’s Hospital in Dublin, he was immediately thrown in the deep end in an emergency department that catered for around 50,000 attendances annually. In this podcast episode, Peter recounts how he set about the management of the huge number of patients, which he compares to deali...

Dr Diarmuid O’Shea is a Consultant Physician in Geriatric Medicine at St Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin, former President of the Irish Gerontological Society and National Clinical Programme Lead for the Older Persons Programme of the HSE and RCPI and, presently, the 143 rd President of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. Dr O’Shea’s clinical and research interests include syncope,...

Professor Jean O’Sullivan  is a Consultant in Emergency Medicine at Tallaght University Hospital, in Dublin, Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, and Chair of the Board and Founder of Global Emergency Care Skills (a.k.a. GECS), a voluntary, non-profit charity organisation which she founded in 2008, and which provides high quality emergency care training to healt...

Professor Cliona Ni Cheallaigh is Consultant in General Medicine and Infectious Disease at St James’s Hospital in Dublin, Associate Professor of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, and Lead Clinician in the world’s first ‘Inclusion Health Service’ at St James’s Hospital. Professor Ni Cheallaigh’s academic work includes dozens of peer-reviewed publications and over 9000 citations for which she has...