Staff and Patients
Frank Pantridge, the "father of emergency medicine", was a cardiac consultant at the hospital for over 30 years. During his time at the Royal, Pantridge developed the portable defibrillator, which revolutionised emergency medicine by allowing patients to be treated early by paramedics.
Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) politician Carmel Hanna worked as a nurse in the hospital. Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) politician David Ervine was admitted on January 7, 2007, and died there the following day. During the Northern Ireland Troubles, the R.V.H. was regarded as one of the best hospitals in the world for the treatment of gunshot wounds. Gunshots to the knee (associated with "punishment" shootings) enabled surgeons at the R.V.H. to gain renown with their treatment of such injuries.
Read more about this topic: Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast
Famous quotes containing the words staff and/or patients:
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)