Prestigious new award for doctors in training named after much-loved Navan physician

The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) is honouring the memory of well-known Navan physician Dr Kate McGarry with a prestigious new award for doctors in training.

The award will be given annually to the trainee doctor who has submitted the best review of a medical journal article.

Doctors who are training to be specialists are encouraged to keep up-to-date with current medical literature throughout their training and with this in mind, we are launching a new e-Journal Club at our annual St Luke's Symposium on Friday 18 October 2019.

The initiative is the brainchild of the RCPI Trainees’ Committee and will be facilitated by new virtual learning technology (Brightspace) recently launched by RCPI.

Doctors in both Basic and Higher Specialist Training will be able to submit article reviews throughout the year. Reviews from doctors in BST that are selected for publication will be considered for the Kate McGarry Prize.

The Kate McGarry Prize will be presented at the annual National Education Day for Doctors in Training, which is organised by the RCPI Trainees’ Committee each year.

The award is a fitting tribute to Dr Kate McGarry, who was a very popular and skilled trainer of young doctors. She was a much loved Consultant Physician in Navan and a Fellow on RCPI Council for 25 years.

She had a special interest in non-invasive cardiology and played a major role in developing Cardiology services in Navan.

In RCPI, she served as Vice President, Censor, and Associate Director of Hospital Site Accreditation. She was also President of the Irish Heart Foundation. She had over 30 international publications and helped discover a new genetic abnormality in an Irish family with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

She was a trailblazer for Irish women in Medicine, and a thoughtful and compassionate doctor. She passed away on 5 January 2018.

The inaugural Kate McGarry Prize will be awarded in 2020.