Medical couple aim to set up one-stop shop for healthcare

Date Published: 11-Apr-2013

 These days we are used to hearing stories about Irish people leaving home to seek work in foreign countries with better economic climates than ours. Very rarely do you hear of emigrants coming back home to achieve business success.

But that’s exactly what Róisín Joyce and Eoin Ó Conaire have done. Galway-born Róisín and Eoin, who is originally from Kildare, have just set up a business in Galway City, which is aimed at helping people achieve optimum physical and mental health. Eoin is a physiotherapist and Róisín has a doctorate in clinical psychology and while that’s the nucleus of their business at present, they intend to expand it to cover a range of healthcare from podiatry to nutrition to child psychology and more.

The two, who are in their 30s, met in Galway during the 1990s and have spent 16 years in England where Róisín trained and worked in clinical psychology. Six years ago she received a doctorate from Oxford Institute of Clinical Psychology at Oxford University, where she specialised in adult mental health psychology and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Meanwhile, Eoin qualified as physiotherapist in 1999 and went on to train further at post-graduate level across a range of specialisations, while also amassing a wealth of practical experience.

If they were to sum up their philosophy about treatment in a nutshell, it’s about getting people better and keeping them that way.

“I’d always had an interest in sport and exercise,” explains Eoin from their newly-decorated treatment rooms in the modern Geata na Cathrach building in the city’s Fairgreen Road. “My brother has a disability and he’s in a wheelchair so I knew about the importance of physical therapy for disability.”

Although he initially graduated from NUIG with an Arts Degree, Eoin’s true calling was physiotherapy and so, after emigrating to the UK he studied it at the University of Brighton and received a first-class honours degree. He subsequently worked at St George’s Teaching Hospital in London and broadened his experience. At the same time, he worked for Crystal Palace Football Club and was squad physio for the English Amateur Boxing squad.

For the past eight years Eoin worked for the NHS at various trusts in Central London, where he was first appointed team leader and then clinical lead. In that role, he built up an award-winning multi-disciplinary service. Meanwhile, he was studying for an MSc in Advancing Physiotherapy, which really sparked his interest in research.

“Our concept is about an evidence-based approach to healthcare,” Eoin says. It might sound a bit technical, but actually it isn’t, as he explains.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.