O’Donnell retired on Friday as clinical director of immunology/immunopathology. He started his time at Christchurch Hospital in 1977, as a medical student, moving up from Dunedin.
After three years, he left for Waikato and was then based in a couple of other spots, including two years back in Christchurch, but by 1989, he was back as a consultant and he has remained ever since.
O’Donnell has seen many changes in his time there, with the most notable being the complete change in the hospital buildings and the huge advances in computing technology.
“When I started, there was no internet and there have been huge advances in computing technology,” he said.
“Email didn’t exist, so communication is much more rapid, with cell phones and things like that. When we were on call, people used to carry around these bricks of a phone. I inherited one of those bricks to carry around.”
In laboratories, the automating of testing had also been a big change, although less so in his specialty area of immunology, where some testing still needed to be done manually, he said.
“You still get the scientist standing at a bench and pipetting things.”
There were also big changes in the understanding of the immune system.
“Increasingly, it is recognised that many diseases we deal with are an aberration of the immune response. Certain diseases, like encephalitis or certain muscle diseases, it’s the immune system attacking those organs to produce some quite bizarre changes in those organs, which we never thought of as being part of us, in terms of our immune system, going haywire.
“We often saw them as perhaps a virus or some other thing, but often, it turns out it is the immune system attacking things.”
In Christchurch, he said there was an interest in muscle diseases and particularly those triggered by statin use.
“Its a very rare complication, but it is one of the interests we have locally, testing for that sort of disorder called auto-immune myositis – an auto immune muscle inflammation. We have done some work and publications in that area.”
He still found the area fascinating and was amazed how quickly his time in the job had gone by.
“I could have started yesterday.”
As he departs after more than 40 years, O’Donnell said the health system was going through its third major shake-up.
“Health is always under strain. It’s inevitable it will change. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful people yelling and posturing. Everybody knows there is a strain and we have to work together to come up with a system that works, without extracting things from other people all the time.
“We have to work together and realise what the limitations are, and be realistic about what we can deliver, without crashing the system entirely.”
