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 healthcare professionals in Africa. To date, GECS has

provided training courses for over 600 doctors, nurses and clinical officers in six African

countries, where sepsis and trauma are the leading causes of death.

GECS training is provided through simulation-based courses in trauma care, resuscitation

skills and major incident management. All of the instructors are volunteers, who pay for their

own travel, and fund-raise for the organisation, and they’ve included paramedics from the

Dublin Fire Brigade, and many of the Ireland’s leading emergency physicians, like Drs Ger

O’Connor, Eoin Fogarty, Cian McDermott, and Rob Eager, as well as Jean herself.

Once the courses are completed, local trainers are empowered to continue the skills training

for other colleagues and to lead the regional development of emergency care, and both

teaching equipment and lifesaving medical equipment (like portable ultrasound machines) are

provided to their hospitals. GECS has partnered with the World Health Organisation, the

College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa, and the African Federation for

Emergency Medicine.

In 2021, GECS was the winner of the prestigious Royal College of Emergency Medicine

William Rutherford Humanitarian Award. And in June 2024, Professor O’Sullivan was

presented with the International Federation of Emergency Medicine Humanitarian Award in

Taiwan, for her ‘exemplary leadership ...(in the) development of safer emergency care in

areas of sub-Saharan Africa over the course of 16 years, through her vision, hard work and

the ability to inspire others’. It is no exaggeration to say that the announcement of the latter

award, in particular, was received with undiluted pride by the whole of the Irish emergency

medicine community.

In this podcast episode, Jean reflects on the origins of her humanitarian work and her growing

involvement in global online medical education with the United Nations, as well as the major

activities ‘at home’ with which she has been associated, from a ‘whistleblowing’ saga to her

role with the Injuries Resolution Board, as well as her therapeutic pastime of painting.

And in the process, the listener will hear how she left the podcast host very red-faced, indeed!

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