In 2021, GP Paddy Davern returned to Ireland after eight years working as a doctor in Qatar. Four years on, the Tipperary man is still struggling to come to terms with the time he spent working with the Special Operations Service (SOS), a specialist medical team treating the country’s royals and other VIPs.
October 22nd, 2020, was the toughest day of those eight years, he says. He was called to attend to a patient with a long history of addiction and who ended up holding a gun to the doctor’s head.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Dr Davern told Irish Times Health Correspondent Shauna Bowers for an article published this week. “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.”
This wasn’t the only troubling interaction Dr Davern faced while in Qatar. A few years earlier, in 2017, he treated a Kenyan woman who miscarried her twins but was facing arrest because she did not have documentation proving she was married.
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“I kept thinking that could be my daughter,” the Tipperary doctor told The Irish Times. “And if it was my daughter, I would like someone who can help to help.”
In today’s episode, Dr Davern lays bare the working conditions and ethical dilemmas he faced during his time in Qatar, while warning international doctors to think twice before moving to the Middle Eastern country.
Irish Times health correspondent Shauna Bowers joins the podcast.
Presented by Sorcha Pollak. Produced by Suzanne Brennan and Andrew McNair.
