‘It shows the heart and soul of the hospital’: Kilkenny doctor on RTÉ series and life in cancer treatment

With nearly a thousand inpatients and outpatients along with hundreds of daily emergency cases, Cork University Hospital (CUH) is one of the largest and busiest institutions of its kind in the country. 

Viewers have been transported behind the scenes for a look at the day-to-day operations in RTÉ’s docuseries, Any Given Day: Cork University Hospital, with staff and patients having their stories told through the lens of often high-pressure situations.

Among the hospital staff introduced so far is Kilkenny’s Dr Dearbhaile Collins, Clinical Director of Cancer Services and Consultant Medical Oncologist, whose years of studying have led her to the forefront of cancer research. 

“Cancer is actually fascinating”, Dr Collins says. “I totally understand that it’s a devastating diagnosis, but its ability to develop, to grow, to spread, to be resistant and responsive to different treatments and to be so unique to the person themselves and change over time is why we’ve struggled to find a cure for cancer. It’s such an adaptable and evolving sort of entity”.

Following six years of medical study at UCD, seven years training to be a general surgeon and a three-year PhD at the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland, she moved into cancer surgery and eventually cancer research at the Royal Morrison’s drug development unit in London.

“I was in the part of the Royal Morrison that’s creating the new cancer treatments for the future; the really early phase drugs. These are drugs that have numbers, not names, and they’re being tested for the very first time in some cases”, Dr Collins recalls.

“It was a really cutting edge place to be; really fascinating. I learned a lot about personalised oncology and cancer medicine. Everybody’s cancer is slightly different; how do we personalise cancer treatment so it’s not ‘one chemo fits all?’”

“That’s where I got my experience; I came home in 2017 as a consultant in CUH and have been there ever since,” she adds.

Dr Collins’ also serves as Clinical Lead of the Irish Molecular Tumour Board, runs multiple international studies in Ireland and has won the Irish Cancer Society Clinician Scientist Award and the Royal College of Surgeons Postgraduate Research and Innovation Award.

Care and service runs in the family as Dr Collins’ late father served as a high-ranking diplomat in the Middle East, where she spent much of her childhood before eventually returning to Kilkenny, attending the Model School and Kilkenny College.

“My dad was a director of the United Nations Relief Works Agency, UNRWA, which does a lot of work for the Palestinian people. When I was about four weeks old, we traveled to Saudi Arabia where I spent the next 12 years”, she outlines.

“We would come home to Kilkenny each summer on our break from school and meet with friends and family that were still here. Kilkenny was always home that we came back to”.

“In 1991 when the Gulf War broke out, we were in Jerusalem which was considered a war zone and unsafe so all the families of all the UN people were evacuated to Cyprus where we lived for a number of months before making the final journey back home”.

Criticisms of overcrowding and understaffing in the health service have been long-term national debates, but the Any Given Day series attempts to highlight some of the ways in which CUH is providing cutting-edge care on a daily basis, something which Dr Collins sees as important for viewers to be exposed to.

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“I think it’s such an important piece of positivity. The hospitals and the HSE are by no means perfect and nobody is claiming that they are, but they get a lot of negativity between the emergency departments and patients on trolleys, staffing deficits, infrastructural problems and all those do exist”, she describes.

“The whole purpose of this docuseries is that it shows the heart and soul of the hospital and that is the staff that are in there working tirelessly, at times above and beyond what they are expected to do”.

“I hope people will come away thinking that it’s not all doom and gloom and ‘oh I’m stuck on a trolley for seven hours’. If you need care, the very best in the world is there, being delivered by staff who really devote their lives to this profession,” she asserts.

The cancer patients followed in the series so far have had their tumours successfully dealt with through chemotherapy and surgery, but of course not everyone is so fortunate, a reality which creates a challenging environment as life-changing news has to be delivered.

“Every person who gets a cancer diagnosis is a tragedy”, Dr Collins says. There are patients we can cure which obviously is an incredible success, but that’s not everybody and even though research and treatments are improving, there’s still a lot of patients that we’re unable to even buy that much meaningful time with therapy. It’s very difficult”.

“I can’t say that I’m not impacted on a daily basis by the stories that I come across. It’s hard, but it’s my job and I love that I can give people hope and a plan and buy them time. Those are the things you hold on to when it’s particularly rough”.

Despite the huge mental toll of her career, Dr Collins is aided by the support of her family, her involvement in hockey and especially the feeling of delivering positive news to patients to balance out some of the bad.

“You think of the good stories and the people you’ve cured. We’ve had some remarkable results with patients at stage four; very advanced cancers who’ve managed to get a cure from immunotherapy, or a clinical trial and a new drug”.

“Those are what get you up every day and keep you thinking forward”, she concludes.

Any Given Day: Cork University Hospital, airs Wednesdays at 9:35pm on RTÉ One.

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