Even before UCD engineering graduate John Travers had started his first corporate job, he was unknowingly sowing the seeds for a career change to medicine years later.
With a position lined up at Shell in the Netherlands, he went to do a stint as a volunteer in India. What he saw, heard, smelled and touched there in a home for the dying in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), opened his eyes to inequity and poverty. On leaving that city, he vowed he would dedicate time and energy again to help people in vulnerable positions.
Meanwhile, he continued with life plan A. “I found myself going down this path of very conventionally sensible career development and did well in all of that.”
From Shell he went to do a two-year MBA in Harvard before joining the consulting firm McKinsey. There was plenty of travel “and a huge diversity of really interesting roles” as he worked on problem-solving for large companies and organisations.
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Then he started working for himself, setting up three clean-energy businesses in Ireland and the UK. But outside his busy Monday-Friday career, he had always looked for opportunities to volunteer during time off. He worked in east and west Africa, as well as in services such as St John of God’s care for adults with Down syndrome in Dublin and Festina Lente equine therapy in Bray, Co Wicklow. “I realised that I was getting so much satisfaction, fulfilment and a sense of purpose from that work, and less so from the corporate work, that I simply decided to switch. And so my minor became my major.”
This is why, more than a decade later, Travers is sitting in a new GP practice that he opened with partner Dr Tim Ryan early this year in Dublin 4. But the interview is to talk about his new book, A Shot of Hope: Stories of Quiet Resilience (Orpen Press), a collection of vignettes of people he encountered, primarily over the nine years it took to convert from engineering entrepreneur to GP. A return to UCD for four years of postgraduate medical studies was followed by a year as a hospital intern and then four years of rotation through all the specialities it takes to become a GP.
But the book opens with those dying men in Kolkata, where “perfect outlines of skeletons protrude through glistening skin, open and weeping in parts”. He notes how “incredible” the men are. “They empty back a little rice from their metal bowls if the ration they receive is more than another’s.”
However, “the horror of the home for the dying is many times worse than I can lay down in words”.
It is a world apart from the freshly decorated but as-yet unused upstairs waiting room of Sandymount Green Medical where we talk on a midweek afternoon, with children’s voices drifting up from the park outside. Furnished sparsely, with a couple of pristine sofas upholstered in gold-coloured fabric, the room awaits further expansion of a practice that has gone from zero to 1,000 patients since January and aims to have an eventual capacity of 5,000.
But if today were a Monday, Travers would be in the grittier, greyer surroundings of the Granby Clinic in Dublin 1, where he works once a week to provide a walk-in GP service in the mornings for patients who are experiencing homelessness, with a more structured clinic for asylum seekers in the afternoon.
“You could have 160 people walking in, in the morning, between four doctors and a nurse, and you just see them one after the other.”
Yet, there is a great atmosphere, he says. “I always come out feeling uplifted but also very grounded. It’s just such a fulfilling part of the work and week.”
If opening a surgery and the publication of what is his third book are not achievements enough for the first quarter of 2025, Travers was also involved in the launch of a patient management software system for general practice in Ireland last January. He and two colleagues – another GP and a software developer – have spent three years designing and producing the cloud-based system through their company Kinesin.
“We just saw an opportunity to try to make things easier and better for GPs in Ireland. It saves time, it increases practice revenues and can improve patient health by intelligent use of the data.”
Clearly a driven and multitalented individual, Travers is a man of fewer words in person than might be expected. He says he is “somewhat introverted”, and enjoys writing to unwind and “to get a better understanding of very complex situations”. (Dr Hilton Koppe, who was in Ireland recently to lead writing workshops for frontline health staff, would approve.)
I’m absolutely in awe of the ability for some people to find strength and hope in really challenging situations and their ability to bounce back from illness or adversity
He also shows all the signs of being a good listener who would habitually exceed the average of 11 seconds a doctor waits before interrupting a patient (according to a study cited by Travers). The opportunity to sit down one-to-one with patients and to have cradle-to-grave relationships with families is part of what attracted him to general practice. There is “great diversity in the people that you meet every day; you don’t know what’s going to walk in the door every 15 minutes”. The autonomy in running what is effectively a small business also appealed.
Although paperwork and the need to chase and deliver test results sucks time out of a GP’s day, he believes “one of the secrets to ensuring that both you and the person you’re seeing have enough time is not to interrupt them”. Hearing the whole story can offer a shortcut to diagnosis.
His book, a mosaic made from fragments of people’s stories, is described by psychologist Marie Murray in the foreword as “narrative medicine at its best”. The writing sketches patients who stayed in his mind for reasons ranging from the tragic to the hilarious.
There is Marianne, who says she had been held hostage for four hours with a meat cleaver and forced to ingest an unknown brown substance, but disappears before full care can be offered; Mark, whose internal bleeding nearly slips through the diagnosis net because he is more concerned for others than himself in the emergency department; resident psychiatric patient Joan recalling how one day she went out for a newspaper and came back with a sports car; the seven-year-old girl who has not moved or talked since birth but shows a sense of fun by holding her breath when somebody puts a stethoscope to her chest.
“I just felt very compelled to try to capture that spirit of resilience that I witnessed in people that I met along this medical training journey,” he says. “I’m absolutely in awe of the ability for some people to find strength and hope in really challenging situations and their ability to bounce back from illness or adversity and to carry on or push on through that, sometimes stronger than they were before.”
One of the gifts that we all have but often forget, he suggests, is “that we can find strength in some of our hardest moments or our most vulnerable moments”. He speaks from experience. The chapter on his obstetrics training starts with how, just two weeks previously, in a third-floor room of that same maternity hospital, he and his wife, Lisa, lost their first child, James, in a miscarriage at 18 weeks.
The bereavement “created a great sense of empathy when I meet other people who have the same experience”, he says. “It reminds me how powerful nature is, and that no matter how smart we think we are, no matter how good the technology we create, nature takes its own course, ultimately. And we have to learn how to be accepting of that.”
Travers’s stories also offer glimpses of our health service from inside a white coat (or coloured scrubs). He experiences the pressure on hospital emergency department staff “to work harder, faster and longer, to fill resource gaps”. And he questions the design of a system that filters patients through a series of medical professionals with increasing experience, “allowing their sickness to worsen as time slips by”, rather than starting with an experienced doctor who could then delegate their management down the line.
On his first, exhausting day as a GP registrar, he reflects on “a deeply fallible profession, where doing our best in the moment, offering a few thoughts, a pill or two and a referral is our meagre offering in the face of the overwhelming human condition”.
What is also evident through the interweaving of patient stories and trainee commentary is the author’s affection for his native city. He is clearly pleased to hear that this comes through.
“I absolutely love Dublin,” he agrees, particularly “the down-to-earth” parts. “That’s where the character is.” Although he grew up in Dún Laoghaire, he attended Belvedere College in the inner city.
Now, as a fully qualified GP, how does he cope with uncertainty, self-doubt and the risk of over-investing emotionally?
“One of the great advantages and benefits of this work is that you’re working in the moment. In a very mindful way, you’re focusing on the person in front of you, what exactly their symptoms are and trying to walk that path to a better outcome with them.”
It’s a matter of taking the information presented and using the good training, he says, to make decisions within your competency, and which follow medical guidelines and ethics. “If you’re concerned or if you’re not 100 per cent happy with the situation, you reach out to colleagues; you get another opinion; you go for further investigation.”
He sees great similarities between his successive career choices. Engineering is problem solving and using science about the world around you, while medicine is problem solving about the biological world within you. “It’s the same mindset and same skill set that you apply, just different focus.”
He was ahead of the curve in leading research from 2019 on how strength exercises and eating more protein could reverse frailty and build resilience in older people. The effectiveness of such a programme was demonstrated in a 12-month clinical trial and has since been adopted in healthcare circles.
Once Travers has seen his last patient of the day, he clears his head on the cycle home to Rathmines. There Lisa, a barrister by training and now social entrepreneur, and their two daughters - Jennifer (eight and three-quarters) and Julia (seven) - will inevitably pull him in to another kind of focus.
