Dr. Keith Munro recalls Foyle Hospice founder and palliative care pioneer Dr. Tom McGinley ahead of fourth anniversary celebration of his life

The new book was written ‘to perpetuate the name of Dr. Tom McGinley, whose efforts, of mind, heart and hand to establish a hospice, were gargantuan, from the “vision” to the “physical reality”’ and because ‘this and future generations deserve to know what he achieved and how he achieved it’, Dr. Munro writes in a heartfelt dedication.

‘Dr. Tom McGinley: Founder of the Foyle Hospice’ will be launched officially at a special celebration event in St. Columb’s Hall on Wednesday, January 29, on what would have been the fourth anniversary of the legendary Derry doctor’s death.

His friend and kindred spirit recalls with sadness the great loss of a man who did more than anyone throughout his life to revolutionise hospice care in this part of the world.

"On Boxing Day 2020, his 86th birthday, Tom took a stroke and was rushed into Altnagelvin. Even the family weren't able to see him. It was right in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

"He was there for a week or two and a medical consultant told the family he was not going to recover. The family asked if he could return to the hospice,” Keith remembers.

Poignantly it was to his beloved palliative inpatient unit at Ballynashallog that Dr. Tom went to receive his end of life care.

"I believe it was meant to happen. He returned home, to his hospice, which he has now handed over to others to develop and run. He went in on the afternoon of January 28 and passed away peacefully early next morning surrounded by the staff who knew him and his family.

"Honestly, it could only have been that way. It was a gift from God that he returned to the building that he inspired.”

In ‘Dr. Tom McGinley’ Keith has produced a beautiful 235 page monument to the life of the much-missed Derry doctor and anaesthetist.

It covers his early life growing up in Derrybeg in the Gweedore Gaeltacht, his education at St. Eunan's College in Letterkenny and at University College Galway and his early days as a Houseman at Altnagelvin and later as a GP in Derry.

Dr. Munro relates how Dr. McGinley’s heart-breaking experience of trying to care for a young cancer patient in the 1960s had been a seminal moment.

It changed his life and ultimately catalysed the campaign for the Foyle Hospice.

Michael Donaghy was a 19-year-old St. Columb’s College pupil who was studying for his A-Levels. Dr. McGinley was treating him at home and was frustrated at the inadequacies of pain relief at that time.

“He was treating Michael for terminal bone cancer. He was actually studying for university. One night he asked Tom, ‘am I going to be cured of this?’

"In those days we were taught not to tell the truth so we didn't. And he lied but he was unhappy at lying because he had always been straight up front. The catalyst for starting it was Michael Donaghy. That was what made him go off to learn about pain control.”

Keith, who had arrived in Derry from Queen’s in 1967 came to the same conclusion in similar circumstances some years later.

“I had a student with me one day and we were coming away from a patient I was treating at home with a terminal illness. I said to the student, ‘What we need in this city is a hospice’. Although I didn't know the ins and outs of what a hospice was.”

In 1983 Dr. Munro went to Dr Ailbe Beirne, a consultant geriatrician at Altnagelvin to talk about setting up an inpatient palliative care unit.

“Dr. Beirne smiled and said, ‘Yes but you better hurry up because Tom McGinley has started raising money for a hospice,” recalls Keith.

"That was late 1983. I went over and immediately I realised that he was well ahead of me in his planning. He was focused, amazingly focused on the whole thing, whatever came in to try and stop him. He was right down the path and determined until they opened the unit in 1991. He went flat out.”

Dr. Tom McGinley 1934-2021: An extraordinary human being, a great humanitarian who leaves an exemplary legacy of medicine and care without borders or exclusions

During the 1960s and 1970s Dr. McGinley had thrown himself into the study of pain relief and palliative care with a vengeance. He had trained as an anaesthetist while still working as a GP.

“The revolution was coming in,” says Dr. Munro, “and Tom was determined to learn all about palliative care and the upcoming use of strategic morphine, if you want. He introduced the syringe-driver [a device to deliver medications such as painkillers] to this area. He didn't invent it. It had already been used but he saw it as being central to the help and the treatment of those who were in their last months.”

By the early 1980s a steering group was set up and in January 1984 it set a goal of raising a substantial £500,000 for an inpatient hospice.

“We felt we had to mention the inpatient unit even though it was a long way down the line because if we talked about palliative care at home it didn't have the same focus for the public as a building,” says Keith.

Dr. Tom and others started organising fundraising runs to raise money. Support groups were set up around the district and collected lots of funds.

In March 1985 the Foyle Hospice bought its first premises at Crawford Square from where palliative care at home was organised.

"Rosemary Houston and Hanna Healy were the first two palliative care nurses. They did a course in England and came back and were keen to get started.

"Doctors were invited up. GPs from around the area. Believe it or not about 90 turned up at Crawford Square and almost to a man and a woman they were highly in favour of what was happening and supported it. They were experiencing the same thing that we had. There was a great surge and need at that time,” Keith says.

‘A gentleman, an angel’ : Your tributes to Dr Tom McGinley

Once the home care service was up and running relatives were beginning to appreciate the new approach and money was beginning to come in. Families would organise fundraisers and coffee mornings to support the hospice.

Tom had a particular vision of where the inpatient unit should be and his initial focus was on the Boom Hall area.

“Eventually he was focusing on the 40 acres that had been the Orange field for a long time,” Dr. Munro explains.

“He stood with me on the Culmore Road one day and said, ‘Keith how can I go to the Orange Order and me a West Donegal Irish speaker?’ And he wasn't really into politics at all.

"He went and he had a good reception from the Orange Order, who, once we started raising more money and the model of the inpatient unit was available for people to see, then the Orange Order bought the first symbolic brick, and they gave us £1,000 around 1989 or 1990.”

A brochure was sent to 35,000 homes in Inishowen and around the border area that raised significant sums and the trustees wrote to every organisation on a lengthy register of charitable trusts and philanthropic organisations. This realised around £110,000.

In 1991 Dr. Tom’s dream of a Foyle Hospice became a reality when a state-of-the-art inpatient unit was finally opened at the western end of the Foyle Bridge. The location had been very deliberately chosen.

“The symbol we took on of the bridge symbolised crossing over. Three metaphors cover that: preparation for crossing over to the next world for the family, patient and relatives - Tom wanted the hospice in sight of the bridge; the other one is that it crossed the border - Tom never allowed the border to stop people coming; and the third one was really transcending the prejudices that existed in this area - the heaviest being Protestant and Catholic who had been killing each other for 300 years on and off.”

Honouring the memory of Dr Tom McGinley

Dr. Munro says the gardens surrounding the inpatient centre that have provided such succour, joy and beauty to patients and their families over the decades were far from an afterthought.

"Tom had this great thought and I had it too, that gardens were vitally important when you are in the last months so that you can be in nature, so that you can see the changing of the seasons. So we were going for this beautiful site, probably, the best site of any hospice in the UK.

“There are lots of volunteers to help with the gardens. There is a path that runs all the way around so any patient who is well enough or any visitor can circumambulate the whole of the hospice and all the scenes of the year - the daffodils and the bluebells and the trees are there.

"Tom was passionate about that. He would be out in the gardens on summer evenings gardening.

"It stemmed from his mother May who believed, as many do, especially out in West Donegal, that death is part of life. We all go through it. We can try hiding it and not speaking about it but it's a natural thing so if you are surrounded by nature you see animals born and die, trees and flowers maturing and dying, the seasons come and go. He knew that embracing the hospice with gardens was something that would maybe help families and the patients amid the naturalness of all of this.”

Dr. Munro dedicates the book to Dr. Tom McGinley and ‘those many thousands, who joined him in the dream he dreamed, and who walked and ran with him over decades, until the opening of the Foyle Hospice during June of 1991 and long after’.

People are invited to attend the official launch in St. Columb’s Hall at 7.15pm on Wednesday, January 29 but spaces are limited so book at www.ticketsource.co.uk/stcolumbshall

Tributes paid to Foyle Hospice founder and Derry icon Dr. Tom McGinley