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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