Plzeň emergency doctor retires after 35 years — colleagues put up a billboard to thank him

A well-known emergency doctor named Dvořák is wrapping up his career in Plzeň after 35 years in emergency medicine. To honour their colleague, fellow medics put up a huge billboard along the road leading into the city, near Bory Prison, thanking him for his years of service.

"I was taken aback. I really didn't expect this. I see it as a great honour," said the doctor, a graduate of the Military Medical Faculty in Hradec Králové. He added that a new professional challenge awaits him — though this time, "something a bit calmer."

From the Škoda plant to the helicopter

Dvořák entered emergency medicine in 1991, when he initiated the creation of a paramedic service at the Škoda factory in Plzeň. A year later, he took up an offer to join the newly formed air ambulance service in Líně. He worked there, with some breaks, until 2013, after which he moved on to work in a regular ambulance.

Over the course of his career, the doctor has clocked up thousands of shifts. "There are calls I'll never forget for the rest of my life. The most recent was in October 2024, when a doctor I knew brutally attacked and killed his colleague with an axe. That image still haunts me," Dvořák recalled.

Lessons from a war zone

The doctor drew on his experience serving in a war zone in Afghanistan even in civilian life — notably while treating a victim of a road accident. He managed to stabilise a young driver whose chest had been pierced by two metal pipe fragments, several centimetres in diameter, from a roadside barrier. The man's car had smashed through the metal barrier and plunged into a seven-metre-deep pit, with the debris impaling his body.

Even then, the situation didn't rattle him. "The nature of the injury matched wounds I'd treated in soldiers from conflict zones, back when I worked in a field hospital. I knew exactly what to do. I stabilised the patient and prepared him for immediate surgery," the doctor said.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz