Dr Owen Dempsey 2021-09-10 Person 5 5 0

My wife - Dr Dempsey's patient - is a retired nurse, and I am a retired consultant surgeon; we have a combined experience of the NHS and its staff approaching one hundred years. Dr Dempsey is a consultant in a million. He is undoubtedly exceptionally bright and his manner is without equal; he is always very pleasant and - while his abilities would easily take him to a high academic position - his knowledge, understanding, approach and total empathy, make him a practicing clinician with few (if any) equals. As we travel some distance to our consultations with him, he always arranges relevant investigations to be performed the same day (chest x-rays, respiratory function tests) so that they are available for his consultation; such 'joined-up' thinking is, sadly, not the norm in today's management-overload in the NHS. We have had face-to-face, telephone and video-conferencing with him over the past two years; in all he is the perfect gentleman, the brilliant physician and the consummate clinician. He also has a technologically adept web-site - easy to use for technophobes of my generation. I cannot think of a way he could improve his personal standards of medical care. Doubtless with more junior staff and support workers (nurses, radiographers, pathologists, radiologists, physiotherapists) and many fewer managers, his working life and clinical skills could be put to better use and his teaching skills used to educate a further generation of physicians in all specialties.