The pay isn't the best and you have to know how to treat everything from battle scars to headaches, but being in the Army Medical Corps is a real vocation, writes ROSEMARY Mac CABE
IN NORTH DUBLIN, somewhere off Infirmary Road and behind the O’Devaney Gardens – a flat complex once destined for redevelopment, a process that has stalled indefinitely – there is a large gate, guarded by members of the Irish Defence Forces.
Up a tree-lined avenue there is a car park; there are two buildings, large and imposing, all full, bright windows and fresh paint. There is no bike park – the Irish Army must, one assumes, prefer travelling on four wheels.
I am at St Bricin’s Military Hospital in Dublin 7 to meet Col Gerald Kerr, director of the Defence Forces Medical Corps, to discuss, well, what the Medical Corps does.
Col Kerr is keen to ensure that I get a good history of the corps. I am loaded up with documentation and historical fact sheets – it is a history that Kerr is proud of, and rightly so.
“The medical corps in the Defence Forces has been around since the foundation of the State,” he says. “We were the first corps to be recognised and given our individual badge collar.”
The medical corps is an essential part of the Defence Forces’ daily operations. Not only do the doctors look after the health and fitness of its members while at home, they travel on missions abroad and cater to the needs of soldiers far from home – so it is, says Kerr, a very specific kind of medicine.
“Were not the same as our counterparts in Civilian Street,” says Kerr, who will refer frequently to Civvy Street in the course of our discussions. “I hope to make approaches to the Medical Council with a view to getting military medicine recognised in its own right.”
The goings-on at St Bricin’s are not only unknown to me; the Army is much of a mystery to a great portion of the population, as Kerr is well aware. “The military tends to be the great unknown. And if people don’t know what you’re doing, you must be doing nothing.
“But why am I so hot and bothered about military medicine being a speciality?” he asks. It is a rhetorical question that, within seconds, he has begun answering himself. “Because it is. In the same way general practice has various elements, military medicine has primary care, occupational medicine, trauma, tropical, travel – all practised in the context of military law.”
To have a place in the medical corps, an individual must be both doctor and soldier – and, though the Defence Forces has begun making provisions for those who wish to study after entering the Army, previous recruitment had been of fully trained doctors, and the problem with that, says Kerr, is all too familiar: money.
“There’s no doubt that the scale of a medical officer pales in comparison to a civilian counterpart,” he says. “But if you wait until somebody is qualified – they do their one-year internship, then they do two or three years ancillary work in whatever their area of speciality is – their salary is growing incrementally, so that by the time they’re finished their four or five years, post-qualification, their salary is up here. And ours . . .” he gestures, is down here.
“My solution to that is taking the one-year post-intern doctor, but if you do that you must ensure he is trained.”
What training is necessary for a doctor working in the Defence Forces? “There’s a terrible irony in it. You train for the absolute worst, always praying to God that it won’t happen. The elements that are most necessary are emergency medicine – experience in AE – because our aim is to prepare for the battlefield – paediatric care . . . There’s nothing more disheartening than to say to a commanding officer, ‘You’re not in the position to deal with the seven-year-old at the gate with a high temperature, because your medical officer has no knowledge of paediatrics’.
“Psychiatry is very important, obs and gynae – because babies don’t announce themselves in their conception, or in their arrival.”
The training is all well and good, and the everyday general practice routine on home soil – “one of our objectives is to prevent disease and promote health” – but what will a medical officer have to deal with in, say, Lebanon? Or Chad?
“What people forget is: road traffic accidents happen everywhere.”
This is not what I had been expecting. “We lost a lot of people to road traffic accidents in Lebanon,” he says. He pauses for a moment. “Mundane things happen more often than bullets and bombs. All wars have shown more casualties occur out of illness than out of trauma. On the sick parade you’ll see everything you see at home, plus. The hot environment encourages infection, and you might get more exotic scorpion bites and that sort of thing. But we have to be set up for and ready to receive trauma.”
It’s not the scene that Carter’s trip abroad in ER had prepared me for but, then again, fiction is fiction. The Medical Corps is real life and, in a stroke that seems almost fictional in its unlikelihood, they are recruiting.
“We offer a way of life,” says Col Kerr. “The first time I went overseas, I saw medical officers caring for their colleagues. They were suddenly really concerned and caring – and all of these people had put their lives on the line.”
The conversation is pleasant; it is a sunny day, his office is floodlit and Kerr’s passion for his role is undoubtable, but it’s not until I ask why he joined that the familiar army bravado comes to the fore.
“There was very little out there, but the one place there was was the army. It was seen as choosing the easy life, but I thought: why aren’t those people who have, for the sake of the State, put their lives on the line entitled to the best possible medical service? So that’s why I joined: I thought they deserved the best.”
