RCSI Safe and Sound Podcast

Helen has been supporting quality improvement within the health and care system for nearly 30 years. She has led and facilitated many nationwide initiatives to improve care, including in cancer services, urgent and emergency care, services for people living with dementia and care in the community.

Helen has demonstrated a constancy of purpose and resilience to stay within the system over the years that is rare in internal change agents. She has managed to keep learning, growing and delivering change. Over time, her focus has shifted from managing big programmes of change to approaches that mobilise and build energy and commitment to change on a very large scale.

Helen has an ability to connect directly with thousands of frontline staff and patient leaders. She is one of the top social influencers in healthcare globally, reaching more than a million people each month through her social media connections, virtual presentations, commentaries and blogs.

Dr. Dale Whelehan is a behaviour scientist with a diverse range of experience comprising human capital, culture, change management, workforce experience, performance consulting, organisational behaviour, and representation and rights.

Having originally trained as a physiotherapist, Dale completed a PhD exploring the impact of fatigue and sleep deprivation in healthcare workers, particularly surgeons, and has published extensively in this field. More recently, Dale was a senior human capital consultant for Deloitte Ireland where he specialised in behavioural science implementation to enable large scale organisational change.

Considered an expert in the field of wellbeing, Dale is passionate about the intrinsic role work plays in fatigue and performance - and how shorter working hours can bring about radical transformation for people's health and happiness.

Professor Oscar Traynor, Director of International Surgical Training Programmes, RCSI

Professor Traynor graduated from University College Dublin School of Medicine in 1974 and completed his basic and senior surgical training with RCSI. He received numerous honours as a student and trainee including the O'Farrell Gold Medal for Surgery, the McArdle Prize for Clinical Surgery and a Fogarty Foundation Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health of the United States.

He was awarded the President's Prize of the Surgical Section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland for his research in 1984 and was the first recipient of the RCSI Surgical Travelling Fellowship in 1985. His research into pre-neoplastic and field changes in the colon during carcinogenesis led to the granting of an MCh degree by thesis in 1986.

Professor Traynor was appointed as Consultant Surgeon at St Vincent’s University Hospital in 1987. He has published his clinical data in more than 100 peer-reviewed journals and has supervised his trainees in the successful completion, presentation, and publication of their research projects.

RCSI is pleased to announce that our Safe and

Senator David Norris is an Irish scholar, independent Senator, and gay and civil rights activist.

Born in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, David Norris is a former Trinity College lecturer and member of the Oireachtas. He has served in Seanad Éireann since 1987 and is the first openly gay person to be elected to a public office in Ireland.

He is an expert on James Joyce and is associated with the James Joyce Cultural Centre, Dublin and the Irish Georgian Society.

David Norris campaigned to overthrow the anti-homosexuality laws in Ireland and ran for the President of Ireland in October 2011.

Dara O’Keeffe is the Simulation Lead in Postgraduate Surgical Education and Training at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She trained in surgery in Ireland for eight years before entering the field of medical education in 2006. At RCSI she designed and implemented national assessments in technical and non-technical skills, before moving to Boston in 2010. There she held the position of Assistant Director of Simulation-based Learning at the Brigham and Women’s hospital and a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School. In 2015, she returned to RCSI to further expand the postgraduate simulation curriculum in Surgery and Emergency Medicine.

Prof Ian Robertson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin (1999–2016) and was the founding Director of Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, as well as Dean of Research of Trinity College, from 2004–2007. Ian is Founding

Ian studied and trained at Glasgow University and the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London. Currently Emeritus Professor at Trinity College Dublin and Co-Director of GBHI, he previously spent 8 years at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University and before that at Edinburgh University.

Dr Chris Turner is consultant in emergency medicine at University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire. He is interested in governance and highly performing teams, and this has led him on a journey from being blame and process focused to something completely different, Civility Saves Lives, a campaign that aims to raise awareness of the impact of behaviour on performance. Over the last few years this idea has gained momentum and traction across healthcare and beyond.

Professor Steven Yule is Chair of Behavioural Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and leader of the Edinburgh Surgical Sabermetrics Group. He is also Programme Director of the MSc in Patient Safety and Clinical Human Factors within Edinburgh Surgery Online, and Director of Non-Technical Skills at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

Professor Yule is an academic psychologist and human factors scientist; internationally recognized for his work in non-technical skills, patient safety, and surgical team simulation. He has extensive experience studying team performance across industrial sectors, including healthcare, energy, transportation, space exploration, and elite athletics.

Current work includes automating assessments of technical and team skills, embedding video and sensors to measure clinical expertise, and translating performance analytics from professional sports to enhance surgical performance in low, middle and high resource contexts.

Research conducted by the Edinburgh Surgical Sabermetrics Group is funded by National Institutes for Health (NIH), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Melville Trust for Care and Cure of Cancer, Canadian Department of National Defence, United States Airforce, Johnson & Johnson, The Circulation Foundation, and Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.

Before joining the Faculty at Univeristy of Edinburgh, Prof Yule was Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School (2011-2020) and Director of Research, Education and Innovation at the STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation, Brigham & Women’s Hosptal in Boston, USA.