Professor Jonathan Hourihane, one of the world’s leading paediatric allergists, is Head and Professor of Paediatrics in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland University of Medicine and Health Sciences and consultant paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital Ireland in Temple St, in Dublin. He was previously Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health in University College Cork.

Professor Hourihane graduated from Trinity College Dublin, in 1987, and he obtained his Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Southampton, in 1996, for his thesis entitled “Clinical and immunological features of peanut allergy”.

In this extended podcast, Jonathan recalls his somewhat faltering start in medicine, following which ‘hard work’ and ‘deep study’ led to a joint first place in Final Med; he talks of the need to recognise when a ‘door of opportunity’ opens, often unexpectedly, and he reflects on a career that took him from Dublin to London, Southampton to Cork, and then back to Dublin. He doesn’t shirk controversy but offers pragmatic views on issues like Sláintecare, the new consultant contract and generous salary, the obstacles to efficiency so often embedded in consultants’ workplaces, and the vexed topics of medical recruitment and retention. And, for specialist and general listener alike, he provides a handy review of the practical management of peanut allergy, anaphylaxis, hay fever and rhinitis, while highlighting the important distinction between food intolerance and allergy.

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