Faculty of Paediatrics welcomes three Honorary Fellows of RCPI
Three distinguished doctors received the award of Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland at the Faculty of Paediatrics Autumn Conference on Friday, 11 October at No. 6 Kildare Street.
Deputy Dr Leo Varadkar (TD, Former Taoiseach)
Dr Leo Varadkar is a medical doctor who graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 2003. He subsequently gained experience as a non-consultant hospital doctor and qualified as a General Practitioner in 2010. In addition, he has had an extremely distinguished and significant political career as a TD in Dail Eireann. He has held Ministries in Health, Social Protection, Transport, Tourism and sport; and has served with enormous distinction as Tánaiste and Taoiseach.
Throughout his career, Dr Varadkar has made an outstanding and very significant contribution to the health of people in Ireland and internationally. He has particularly enhanced the health and well-being of children throughout Ireland and their families-prioritizing them in all of his roles.
Dr Varadkar has been instrumental in securing the implementation of measures to improve the health and wellbeing of the people of Ireland, with a particular focus on children and their families.
From free GP care for children under six to prioritising the National Children’s Hospital and establishing the Child Poverty and Wellbeing Programme, his impact has been immense. He led Ireland’s response to the pandemic, implemented the provision of full medical cards for all children with serious disabilities, and introduced better parental leave as well as paternity benefit. Deputy, Dr Varadkar was particularly supportive of RCPI’s efforts to regulate the sale of alcohol – which was a major priority to improve health identified by RCPI Members. He was an advocate for the bill creating vital public awareness of the issue and as Minister for Health successfully brought the Public Alcohol Bill into effect in 2015.
Prof Laura Viani (Consultant Otolaryngologist and Neuro-Otologist, Beaumont Hospital)
Professor Laura Viani is a TCD graduate, who trained in Ireland, UK and Switzerland.
She is a consultant neuro-otologist, of 30 years’ experience. In addition to her role as a consultant surgeon, she has been a public-only clinician, trainer, researcher, lecturer, policy advisor, as well as being the founder and manager of a national specialty. She enjoys an international reputation as a leader in hearing sciences and surgery.
Over 30 years ago she conceived of the idea of a National Cochlear Implant Program and persuaded the Department of Health of its necessity and established the programme at Beaumont hospital.
She set up a multi-institutional hearing research centre involving RCSI TCD universities in USA and Latin America in 2016.
Dr Richard O’Reilly (Former Chair of Department of Paediatrics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York)
During his fifty-year career, Dr O’Reilly has made extraordinary contributions to haematology, immunology and cancer care for both children and adults. For most of this time, he was the Chair of the Department of Paediatrics and Chief of the combined Adult and Paediatric Bone Marrow Transplantation Service.
His research accomplishments are immense and have had a profound impact on clinical medicine.
Together with Dr Bo Dupont, he performed the first successful allogeneic bone marrow transplant using an HLA matched but unrelated donor. This technique allowed for a great widening of the pool of marrow donors and the availability of transplantation. Matched unrelated transplantation is now a standard of care and it is estimated that 68,000 patients have been so-treated world-wide.
Together with Dr Yair Reisner, he developed the T cell depleted bone marrow transplantation. This innovation represented a huge advance for the field, dramatically reducing the complication of graft versus host disease.
Dr O’Reilly’s research has also been critical in helping to understand the interplay between T cells and graft rejection. He also developed novel conditioning chemo-radiotherapy regimens. In more recent years he has pioneered the approach of using banked antigen specific third-party t-cells for the treatment of infection or relapse following marrow transplantation.
His work has helped advance the rapidly developing area of cellular therapy of cancer, a field which is now extending beyond blood cancers into the treatment of other solid tumours.
Dr O’Reilly is also a great teacher, leader, organiser and mentor and graduates of his training programmes occupy leadership positions throughout North America, Europe and the rest of the world.
During the conferring ceremony 25 Fellows and 2 Associate Members were admitted and 19 doctors received Certificates of Satisfactory Completion of Training (CSCST) and 8 post-CSCST.