October 22nd, 2020, began like any other day for Irish GP Paddy Davern.
It was a Thursday and the Tipperary doctor, who had been working for several years in Qatar as a physician for the royal family, received a call requesting he attend to a patient. He had treated the patient before but not frequently.
The man had a long history of addiction and a “fondness” for guns; he often kept one near his bed.
The man also had a history of making violent threats, according to healthcare workers who previously treated him, and a former bodyguard.
READ MORE
Davern arrived at the patient’s palace early that morning. As was typical, there were armed security guards at the entrance.
The Tipperary man’s time working in the Middle Eastern country was traumatic. Now he wants to share his story to warn international doctors to think twice about moving there, raising questions about its human-rights record and medical practices.
Describing himself today as a “casualty of the Celtic Tiger”, he moved to the Middle East in 2014 for financial reasons; public pay cuts in the wake of the Irish economic crash had left him in difficulty.
A newly established mobile healthcare service in Qatar brought an opportunity to reverse his fortunes, he thought.
The service was run out of Doha, Qatar’s capital, by the Hamad Medical Corporation, the main public healthcare provider in the Gulf state, reporting to the country’s minister for health.
Davern worked for the mobile health service from 2014 until 2017, when he joined the Special Operations Service (SOS), a specialist medical team treating the country’s royals and other VIPs.
The role was a far cry from what he was used to in Tipperary, resulting in many unusual call-outs, including the one on October 22nd, 2020.
That morning the Irish doctor says he was met with a request for pain relief as soon as he arrived at the patient’s palace.
Today, sitting at his dining table in Tipperary, the 62-year-old physically trembles, recalling what the patient did next.
The patient “went into a rant, saying: ‘You think I’m an addict, I’m not an addict’”, says Davern.
“Then he got a gun out from under his pillow, a black Glock [handgun]. And then he went around behind me and put the gun to the back of my head and started pacing around behind me.
“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to make eye contact with him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I just froze. I thought he was going to kill me.”
Davern looked at the open door to the right of him, evaluating his options. He thought: “Can I run for the door?” He felt it was too far away and the man had a gun.
“Can I turn around and tackle him?” he remembers thinking then.
“I don’t know where he is because he’s pacing behind me. I just stood there ... I just thought this guy was going to kill me,” he says.
The patient eventually calmed down enough to allow Davern examine him. Davern told him he needed to take blood samples to the laboratory, and would return when he had the results.
“This was my escape plan,” he says.
Shortly after Davern left the compound, he says the patient started firing a gun outside another home where some of the patient’s estranged family members lived.
A nursing colleague of Davern’s was also caught up in the incident. She rang Davern asking for help. When he attempted to remove her from the dangerous situation, he says an armed guard stopped him and had “a rifle stuck in my chest”.
He begged the guard to let him go, he says. “I said: ‘If you keep me here, I’m going to get shot.’”
The patient eventually returned to the compound and came face to face with Davern and the nurse. He told the Irish doctor to “f**k off”.
Davern and the nurse were eventually allowed to leave.
This day was the toughest of his eight years in the Middle East. However, he says it wasn’t the only troubling interaction he faced while in Qatar.
Two years earlier, in February 2018, Davern raised concerns with his boss, a British doctor named David Houston, about continuing to prescribe addictive painkillers to this same patient, according to Telegram messages between the two doctors, which have been seen by The Irish Times.
In response to Davern’s concerns, Houston told him SOS staff had to manage “difficult patients with complex care needs under challenging conditions”.
This “often requires pushing the clinical, ethical and professional envelope while at all times avoiding crossing the line of safety”, Houston wrote in a message on February 15th, 2018.
“Quality and safe healthcare are paramount, but medical ethics and practicalities sometimes have to be compromised when one considers the bigger picture and possible outcomes of each course of action.”
SOS is run by the Qatari government and has a strict hierarchical structure, former employees have told The Irish Times.
Houston, Davern’s boss, served as executive director of the SOS, which was under the ambulance service, run by Prof Robert Owen, originally from South Africa. The ambulance service is part of the Hamad Medical Corporation.
Working in the SOS created difficult situations for employees, multiple sources told The Irish Times.
One former colleague of Davern’s, who did not want to be named, described Qatar, which has a population of 3.12 million, as “a place where it is very difficult to say no”.
The source said in the SOS doctors have to address “ethically dubious situations at short notice, at awkward times and often information-blind”.
This is not a democracy. The closer you are to the centre of power in Qatar, the less the rules are going to apply or can be bypassed or bent
— James Lynch, a human rights researcher
A VIP patient
The treatment of another patient, in 2019, is another case that troubled Davern and two others who were familiar with her care.
The woman, a member of an important Qatari family, was brought into the Naufar drugs and alcohol rehabilitation centre in Doha. The centre has a number of so-called villas where VIP patients stay.
Staff were told the patient would be there for a long time, she was not to have any access to the internet or social media and police would be present at all times in her villa, according to notes of the directions given to clinicians and seen by The Irish Times.
Despite being told she had an addiction, medics “didn’t find any psychiatric or addiction problems” upon assessment, one staff member said. This was confirmed by other sources familiar with her treatment.
Multiple healthcare staff who treated the patient reported her saying she had been detained because she had written posts on social media that were critical of the country and its ruling family – a crime under Qatar’s penal code, according to Human Rights Watch, an international nongovernment organisation that investigates human rights abuses globally.
A UK paramedic, who worked in Qatar for a number of years, described the woman as a “nice, warm human being”, but he says her health and appearance deteriorated due to a lack of socialisation.
“She would say she had chest pain or abdominal pain so you’d go see her. But it was mainly just to talk to somebody,” says the paramedic. “[There was] no actual diagnosis and no actual crime.”
In March the patient stopped eating for a number of days, an internal email among medics shows.
The email from Dr Houston to Prof Owen states she was frequently “unhappy, tearful, subdued, anxious and feeling hopeless”.
They did not believe her actions were a “hunger strike”, but she “appears to be giving up and is ambivalent about the future”. He cited not knowing why or for how long she would be in the facility as two “causes of her feelings and hopelessness”.
Davern says he attended to her on one occasion, on April 5th, 2019, and offered to make representations on her behalf over her continued detention, but she declined.
“I don’t think she trusted people any more,” he says.
The woman was still in the facility when Davern left Qatar in 2021. At that point, she had been there for three years. Davern does not know her current whereabouts.
‘This is not a democracy’
The outlined situations do not come as a surprise to James Lynch, a human rights researcher for UK-based NGO Fairsquare, and former British diplomat who was based in Doha.
According to Lynch, the royal family in Qatar has “absolute power and total authority” and as such, it can be very difficult to disagree or challenge any directions that come from them.
“This is not a democracy,” he says. “The emir’s word is final. I think it’s fair to say the closer you are to the centre of power in Qatar, the less the rules are going to apply or can be bypassed or bent.”
Three things that really struck Davern while in Qatar was the treatment of migrant workers, the criminalisation of same-sex relationships, and the attitudes towards women, who can face arrest and up to seven years’ imprisonment for sex, pregnancy and childbirth outside marriage.
He recalls one woman he treated in hospital, who miscarried twins in 2017 when she was 27 weeks pregnant. The Kenyan national says she was married, but came to Qatar without her husband on a single visa.
The patient, who spoke to The Irish Times but did not want to be identified, says her unplanned pregnancy occurred during a visit to Kenya but Qatari police did not believe it was within a marriage due to a lack of physical documentation.
“I had just lost my kids,” she says. “Just an hour after I delivered them, the police were already there. It was a horrid moment. They said they were just waiting for the hospital to clear me and then they would take me to jail,” says the woman, crying at the memory.
On her fifth day in hospital, Davern visited. She told him her story. He promised to help her – organising accommodation, writing letters of support and attending meetings and hearings with and for her.
The police, she says, had her passport; she could not leave the country.
After six months of uncertainty, she was told she was free to leave. She now has a three-year old son, has remarried and is living in another country in the Middle East.
She is grateful for Davern whom she calls “a friend, a mentor and a doctor all in one”.
Asked why he helped, Davern says: “I kept thinking that could be my daughter. And if it was my daughter, I would like someone who can help to help.”
Though Davern says he constantly questioned the ethics of Qatar, finances kept him from leaving sooner.
On October 10th, 2021, almost a year after he was held at gunpoint, he submitted his resignation after learning his father was dying. He arrived in Ireland on December 2nd that year, missing his father’s death by two days.
“I never got to tell him that I loved him,” he says.
When he return to Ireland, Davern threw himself into a new job but the high-profile advertisements for the football World Cup in Qatar in 2022 resurfaced difficult memories and he became angry.
It was a turning point; he realised he had not come to terms with the impact of his time in Qatar.
He called his friend, fellow GP in Cork, Don Coffey telling him: “I need help.”
The two doctors had met when they worked in Qatar. While in the Gulf state, Coffey says Davern was “a very solid man” and “go-to person for people who wanted help”.
But when he reached out for help, he was completely different, he says.
“He was very quiet, preoccupied,” says Coffey. “He had poor sleep and was ruminating a lot about what happened in Qatar. He was quite anxious.
“That’s what depression does to us. People lose their personality, their zest for life.”
In August 2022 Davern was prescribed antidepressants and began therapy. Reports by his treating clinicians state he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.
But his time in Qatar continued to plague him.
At weekends, he drank too much wine, playing the events from his time in the Middle East over and over again in his head.
It was on a number of these occasions after drinking, between March and November 2022, he sent a barrage of threatening and aggressive messages to former colleagues he worked with in Qatar.
Davern made death threats, called those former colleagues names, abused them in messages, criticised their religion, families and backgrounds, using crude, racist and ableist language he is now deeply ashamed of.
“That is something I really regret,” says Davern. “It’s not representative of my values. I’m very ashamed of that.”
In an official report dated October 22nd, 2024, Joan Long, his treating psychologist, said the messages were sent while Davern was under the influence of alcohol “at a time when he was most vulnerable and grieving his father”.
She said it was “very significant” that Davern was “experiencing severe post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms at this time” due to the trauma of his past work in Qatar.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Long explained “when someone feels that powerless and they’re traumatised, they will carry out behaviours and do things that are out of character for them and are wrong”.
In response to his abusive messages, between November 10th and 23rd, 2022, three former colleagues – his former boss at SOS, David Houston; Nick Castle; and Abdul Rahman Bagher Raeissi – individually reported Davern to the Irish Medical Council, the regulatory body for the medical profession in Ireland.
Two years later, in November 2024, the regulator closed the complaints against him, acknowledging his response that the “extremely difficult and challenging working environment” while in Qatar had “a significant impact” on his mental health.
Minutes of the council’s complaints committee state: “There is no sufficient cause to warrant further action being taken in relation to the complaint.”
The Irish Times sought comment from Dr David Houston and Prof Robert Owen, Davern’s former bosses in Qatar, on the Tipperary doctor’s account of his time working for them. A London-based solicitor Cameron Doley, representing them, responded to detailed queries over a number of weeks.
He declined to comment on interactions with patients Davern treated in Qatar, saying it would be a serious breach of professional obligations.
Doley said Davern was “immediately offered support” by his employers after being held at gunpoint in 2020, but the Tipperary doctor declined this offer.
“The matter was also escalated immediately to the Minister of Public Health and all necessary steps were taken by the authorities to secure the safety of all relevant healthcare professionals and the public more generally,” he said.
Doley pointed out that the Telegram messages between Davern and Houston in February 2018 about “pushing the clinical, ethical and professional envelope” contained “no instance” of Davern disagreeing with Houston on administering painkillers to the patient with a history of addiction.
“Denying effective analgesia to a patient in pain on the basis that they are recovering from substance misuse and/or display challenging behaviour would be considered as being highly unethical by medical professionals anywhere in the world,” he said.
Asked about the woman purportedly treated for addiction for years from 2019, Doley said he couldn’t comment due to “doctor-patient confidentiality” but said the case was “far more complex” than had been “apparently related to you”.
In response to queries, Doley raised questions about Davern’s credibility, pointing to the abusive messages he sent his former colleagues in Qatar. He described Davern as a “classic example of a source wholly lacking in objectivity having scores to settle”.
Responding, Davern denies he has an “axe to grind”, adding that he was often commended for his work by members of the royal family, and he received all his pay and conditions.
A number of questions about Davern’s work and the treatment of vulnerable members of society were sent by The Irish Times to Qatar’s international media office, which were, in turn, shared with Doley.
He did not respond to a query asking whether he was responding on their behalf.
Davern has returned to normal life at home in Ireland, working as a doctor four days a week.
It is almost four years since he left Qatar, but he visibly wears the weight of those experiences. He has a friendly but nervous disposition.
Asked why he is raising these issues again, he says he feels a duty to speak out about what he describes as injustices in Qatar.
“Patient one doesn’t have a voice. Patient two doesn’t have a voice. These people, they don’t have a voice. But I do,” he says.
“And people need to know what’s going on.”
