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. Carrie Cunningham is an associateprofessor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, Section head of the Massachusetts General Hospital Endocrine Surgery Unit and a senior scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Technology Assessment. She is the Association of Endocrine Surgeons research committee chair and executive council member and the President-elect of the Association of Academic Surgery. Her overarching research mission has been to improve the health and well-being of patients with benign and malignant endocrine-related diseases. She is the principal investigator of an NIH/NCI R-37 (R01-type merit award) award to examine the potential impact of new diagnostic technologies and personalized management strategies in patients with thyroid cancer using mathematical disease simulation modeling and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award to develop a patient-reported instrument to assess thyroid-cancer specific quality of life. 

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.