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A Surgeon in…Melbourne MS HELEN MOHAN FRCSI, RECIPIENT OF THE SECOND PROGRESS WOMEN IN SURGERY FELLOWSHIP, SUPPORTED BY JOHNSON & JOHNSON, HAS TAKEN UP A FELLOWSHIP IN COLORECTAL SURGERY AT PETER MACCALLUM CANCER CENTRE IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA he PROGRESS Women in Surgery Fellowship, supported by Johnson & Johnson, is a prestigious bursary awarded by RCSI to promote female participation in surgical training at fellowship level. Ms Helen Mohan travelled with her family to Melbourne earlier this year. “This Fellowship is hugely significant for me, allowing me to advance my career in colorectal surgery and to focus on providing high quality patient care, promoting research and surgical education.” Helen grew up in Raheny on the northside of Dublin, with her parents and younger sister, Sara. “There were no medics in the family,” says Helen. “I was the first, and then I married someone from my class, Rory Whelan, and Sara is now an SpR in Obstetrics and Gynaecology so my poor parents are surrounded by medics!” Helen graduated from the School of Medicine at University College Dublin in 2007 with first class honours. “We were one of the last years in Earlsfort Terrace,” she says. “I was in St Vincent’s University Hospital (SVUH) for final med and did my intern year there, followed by Basic Surgical Training between SVUH and St Michael’s.” Her interest in surgery was first sparked on an elective Ms Helen Mohan, FRCSI in Tanzania. “I worked with a very inspirational surgeon from New Zealand, Dr Tom Gibson, who ignited my interest in surgery, and then during my intern year I had some excellent mentors, including Professors John Hyland and Oscar Traynor.” After the BST, Helen undertook a PhD in Pathophysiology of Inflammation and Cancer, working in RCSI Fellow, Professor Des Winter’s and Professor Alan Baird’s laboratory at SVUH and UCD. “It was a mixture of science and clinical research, looking at orphan nuclear receptors in colon cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, and also analysing the colorectal cancer database,” explains Helen. “As part of the PhD I had the opportunity to spend eight weeks in Denver at the University of Colorado Mucosal Inflammation Programme with Dr Sean Colgan carrying out research on intestinal inflammation and IBD, as well as a month at Arizona State University where I got to work with Dr Raymond Dubois, who had published on the orphan nuclear receptor NR4A2.” Helen’s strong research background is evidenced by more than 60 publications over the course of her career to date. After the PhD, Helen spent a year as a non-training Registrar in Wexford 12
General Hospital before being accepted onto the Higher Surgical Training Programme in 2013. “I did my first year in Wexford, which was great because I already knew people there and had good relationships,” she says. “The following year I went to Cork University Hospital and did six months of colorectal surgery and six months of vascular surgery, and from there I went to the Mater for six months. I took maternity leave when I had my first child, Domhnall, in 2017, and then went to SVUH. It was nice, I had spent so much time there, it felt like coming home.” From SVUH, Helen moved to University Hospital Limerick – “I was pregnant with twins and suffered from severe hyperemesis which was challenging but I was very well supported,” she says. After Oisín and Sophie were born, in June 2019, Helen took maternity leave during which she sat her exams. She was awarded her FRCSI in 2019 and CCST in 2020. Next came a stint at St James’s University Hospital with Professor John Reynolds RSCI Fellow (1998) focused on Upper GI, which is where she was based when COVID-19 hit in March 2020. She spent the last six months before she left for Australia back at SVUH on colorectal with Mr Sean Martin, Professor Des Winter, RSCI Fellow (1998), Ms Ann Hanly, RSCI Fellow (2010) and Mr Rory Kennelly, RSCI Fellow (2014). “There is a lot of moving around,” she says, “but I think we gain from working in different places. You get a real breadth of experience, and working in different units shows you there is more than one way of doing things. You pick up little tricks and tips from everyone you work with. Logistically it can be challenging, particularly when you have little ones. I’ve been lucky in that I have a very supportive partner. When I moved to Limerick with baby Domhnall I was lucky that my husband had finished his training scheme and was able to get a consultant job there at the same time. But when we had the twins, he was still in Limerick commuting while I was back in Dublin. That was tricky.” The family was supposed to leave for Melbourne in January of this year, but shortly before they were due to depart Helen and her three children all got COVID-19. “We had the whole house packed up in crates when we got sick,” she says. “I’d been planning the Fellowship since 2015 and put a lot of energy into it. When Domhnall was five months old I had gone to a conference in Seattle to meet the consultants from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre for my interview, and
