Seamus O'Mahony
Auteur van The Way We Die Now
Werken van Seamus O'Mahony
The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of science, sex and psychoanalysis (2023) 5 exemplaren
The Ministry of Bodies 1 exemplaar
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Curiosity about the state of hospital services in countries other than the US, UK, and Australia is what prompted me to read The Ministry of Bodies by retired doctor Seamus O’Mahony, who writes of his final year of his career at what what he semi-affectionately calls the ministry, more formally known as Cork University Hospital.
“The management narrative – a cynically clever one – was that the ‘trolley’ [bed] crisis was due to ‘low number of discharges over the weekend’, not an inadequate number of beds.”
It’s depressing, though not surprising, to discover that Ireland is no more immune to the woes that affect modern hospitals the world over. The record of O’Mahony’s last year exposes yet another under-resourced hospital system, where the need for services is greater than bureaucracy provides.
“A round could not last longer than three hours....Assuming thirty patients over three hours (I had very often seen more than fifty), that gave an average of six minutes per patient.”
O’Mahony operates as a gastroenterologist consultant, practicing his specialty in his out-patient hospital clinic, and has a regular surgical list, but he spends much of his time in the hospital as a physician on the general medicine service. On the wards he sees patients whom other services refuse to claim, -alcoholics, the elderly, and somatic syndrome sufferers among them, documenting a daily litany of fear, frustration, courage, and crisis.
“I retired on 7 February 2020, the day before my sixtieth birthday.”
While there is some humour here in the absurdities, overall I found The Ministry of Bodies to be a disheartening read. At fifty-nine, O’Mahony finds he is tired of the expectation that he is to do more with less, by long hours, by management double-speak, and petty professional turf-wars, and really, who could blame him?… (meer)