“Everything’s ‘grand’, isn’t it?” John Foran is talking about interactions here. For the consultant cardiologist from London, “partial retirement” from Britain’s NHS in fact meant emigrating to Ireland and a new career; a gradual thing, still with a foot in the UK. “In medicine, you don’t really retire at 60, you sort of keep working.”
He specialises in coronary intervention, heart rhythm disorders, structural heart disease, and stroke prevention techniques, and worked for 36 years in the NHS, in hospitals including Great Ormond Street, King’s College, St George’s, and the Royal Brompton, as well as the “perk” of private work. Foran introduced left atrial appendage closure to the UK in 2003, a minimally invasive procedure reducing stroke risk in atrial fibrillation patients.
A sabbatical aged 60 added cardiac surgical procedures to his palette. “I was doing some stenotomy work, through a video-assisted thoracoscopic port”, working on the heart “through small holes rather than big incisions, which is quite nice”. The sabbatical involved time to reflect, meeting new people – and several job offers.
He realised, “if I don’t move now, I’ll be stuck in the same job for another 10 years”. One offer was from Mater Private Cork, leading its cardiology team, bringing new interventional techniques and stroke prevention therapies to its Cork Heart Centre. It was “an easy choice to make”.
Longer term, he and his wife, Dympna, hope to retire in Ireland, by the sea. He’s a Foran and she’s an O’Farrell, both born in Wimbledon in the early 1960s. Then “after Brexit, both of us became interested in having an Irish passport, like a lot of people”. His grandmother was born in Tralee, and his mother in Islington; her parents were born in Dublin. Would it be correct to say Brexit refugees? “You could say that. An Irish passport is quite a nice one to have when it comes to travelling.”
They had family holidays in Dingle when the children were young, “and even if the rain was horizontal, the kids still loved it”. He recalls Ireland in the 1970s “quite a different place, Dublin then, compared to what it is now. It just sort of grew on us, really.”
He had done some proctoring (demonstrating a medical procedure to colleagues) in Cork, “so when I saw the place again for the first time late last year, I had a deja vu feeling. Some colleagues I work with trained in London, so I knew them at earlier career stages. Medicine’s quite a small world. Cardiology in particular. Colleagues I worked with in London now work back in Ireland or in Northern Ireland.”
The experience of emigrating to another country after 60 was smooth. “It’s not a million miles away. I played squash for a club in Cheam. I’ve found another squash club up the road from Douglas, where I live.” It’s easy to fly back to south London, where they still have a home, to see family and friends, and for their grown-up children, aged 22-27 and based in London, to visit.
They planned the move, finding a two-bedroom apartment to rent in Douglas sight-unseen, with help from the hospital and relocation agents. “I landed on my feet.”
They came across on a ferry during Storm Éowyn. “Obviously it’s quite rugged, weather-wise, along the Atlantic coast. At first it was minus-5, minus-7, snow on the ground in Cork, 10-11 inches in places, drifting, icy roads. It was quite forbidding.” Even with the lovely weather now, “it’s quite amazing. The clouds that come in off the Atlantic and the weather patterns, the winds.”
People are friendly in his apartment block, and at work, “particularly the porters, people who work behind the scenes in the hospital, the receptionists. It’s just a great bunch, very easy to get on with. I’m very blessed, I think.” They knew Kerry but have been exploring places in Munster they didn’t know: Kinsale, Clonakilty, Skibbereen, Ballycotton.
Dympna is a specialist cardiac nurse, “retired” too but working part-time in London, spending half her time in Cork.
In London, John “was doing five different hospitals and almost seven-day working. Here I’m in one place, and it’s five-day working.” He has moved from public healthcare in the UK (plus private patients) to private healthcare here, but is familiar with Irish public healthcare from proctoring. “I’ve got a reasonable idea of what the government hospitals are like. They’re not dissimilar to some NHS hospitals. We have long waiting lists everywhere nowadays. I think the funding maybe is not so good here. The waiting times are longer here, but we have long waits in England too for NHS care.
“Slowly but surely medicine, I think, is changing a bit. Junior doctors have more shift-work patterns, more working-time directive, less vocational feel, compared to what there was 36 years ago. I remember 17 out of 19 days on call when I was a junior doctor. We just took it on the chin and said, that’s the way it is. But now people wouldn’t do that. On the other hand, there‘s no substitute for the exposure and the experience you get from that pattern of learning. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.”
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He has noticed “the roads are very dangerous around here”. He lives near Cork’s South Slip, “and you hear the racing in the middle of the night, motorbikes and high-powered cars speeding down the motorway. I think it’s a common place for people to hang out at night, when the roads are empty, racing each other when they probably shouldn’t. You hear about so many accidents. The quality of the roads isn’t great.
“CUH [Cork University Hospital] is a trauma centre, and many of their A&E doctors work with us at the Mater Private so I get a taste of what’s going on around the place. They’re involved in the helicopter emergency medical service. And I just hear about all the accidents happening all the time, whether it’s down near Baltimore and Bantry, or closer to home. There‘s a lot of news items about young children run over. It just seems a lot more prevalent. Maybe they just report it more over here.”
His patient profile varies more now. “We’re in such a rural area. Cork, five minutes out, you’re in the countryside, beautiful green fields and open spaces. I probably didn’t have many farmers coming into clinic in central London.” Generally “the farming community don’t seem to complain very much, but you know if they have got a complaint, it’s probably quite serious.”
Communication styles can be different with some older patients. “Some people need their wives by their side to be able to express themselves. Taking a history and trying to get to the root of the problem is sometimes a team effort. You need other people to help. It’s the same in any community ... Medicine is about talking to people and examining them. It’s not just about doing tests and interpreting tests. I enjoy the patient interaction. Sometimes you have to tease things out of people. They don’t come out with what’s concerning them straight away. That’s human nature.”
We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com.
