Robert Graves Lecture 2007_Professor Tom O’Dowd
10/09/2007 in Royal College of Physicians in Ireland, 6, Kildare Street, Dublin 2
The private sector in healthcare: contributing to service but not to research
Tom O’Dowd, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Trinity College Centre for Health Sciences, AMNCH, Tallaght, Dublin 24, Ireland
Abstract:
Public and private medicine has lived cheek by jowl in Ireland for many years. In Graves’s time, Lyons recounts how ‘‘the vacancy at the Meath Hospital filled by the celebrated J Graves in 1821 occurred after an interchange of money’’ [Lyons JB (1991) 1834–1844. In: The quality of Mercer’s—The story of Mercer’s Hospital, 1734–1991, Glendale, Dublin, p 70]. Indeed Graves retired from the Meath Hospital aged 47 years to concentrate on his private practice. He continued to work as a consultant to the Adelaide, the Coombe and to Peter’s Parish Dispensary, which was an example of how the philanthropic and the private sector worked together in the 1800s.
Keywords Private/independent healthcare Research versus service Professionalisation
Irish Journal of Medical Science , Volume 176, Issue 4, pp 261-265
This being the forty-seventh Graves Lecture since its beginnings in 1961.