Maureen Nolan is a member of Patient Safety Ireland (PFPSI), since its formation in 2013 under a World Health Organisation programme. PFPSI Champions sit at many HSE service development and quality improvement tables as full and equal partners and advocate for person centred care through collaboration with all stake holders, including the patient across all levels of policy development, implementation, evaluation, design and delivery of services.

As a Patient Voice Maureen is passionate about patient consultation and engagement from the outset and the need for patients to be integral to the considerations and decision making in relation to their own health care pathway, diagnostics, interventions, treatments and outcomes. This engagement needs to be equitable and accessible for all members of our society. Maureen has been actively involved in the safety of patients for almost three decades in a professional capacity, both in the public sector and private sector, and this level of experience has afforded her the rare and valuable attribute of seeing the health services and related systems from both sides.

In 2014, following a life changing trauma involving Maureen’s husband resulted in multiple and continuing experiences which carry over into her patient safety role as a patient representative. Avoidable system failures, delayed diagnosis, poor communication and disconnection by service providers from the person at the centre of it all, the patient, resulted in considerable consequences for Maureen’s husband and family. Patients and their families live with omissions in care for the remainder of their lives.

Dr Olga Kostopoulou is Reader in Medical Decision Making at Imperial College London. Previously, she held academic positions at King’s College London and the University of Birmingham. She holds an MSc and a PhD in Psychology from Cardiff University.

Olga is an applied cognitive psychologist researching judgement and decision making in healthcare. She studies the psychological processes underlying medical diagnosis and the cognitive causes of diagnostic error. She has been involved in the design and evaluation of diagnostic decision support and has researched the impact of risk prediction algorithms on clinical judgement. With substantial external funding, she has studied clinical decisions in primary care, adult and neonatal intensive care, dentistry, and surgery. Olga was the 2021-22 President of the Society for Medical Decision Making and is Associate Editor of Medical Decision Making and Frontiers in Cognition.

Dr Peter MacMahon is a Consultant Emergency Radiologist at the Mater Misericordiae University and Mater Private Hospitals, and a Clinical Professor at University College Dublin.

At the forefront of AI integration in healthcare, Peter has spearheaded the deployment and validation of multiple commercial AI solutions in routine clinical practice at the Mater Hospital. These cutting-edge technologies continuously analyse medical imaging for a range of pathologies, including stroke, traumatic head and neck injuries, pulmonary embolisms, and fractures.

Peter's commitment to advancing medical imaging extends to his collaborative research with UCD, developing novel AI models trained on Mater patient data. This work aims to enhance diagnostic confidence in critical medical emergencies, particularly those related to the spine and brain.

Dr John Fitzsimons is a Consultant Paediatrician with a special interest in allergy at Children’s Health Ireland, Temple Street in Dublin where he is an RCSI Honorary Clinical Associate Professor. He also works with the HSE National Quality & Patient Safety (NQPS) Directorate as Clinical Director for Quality Improvement (QI) and with the RCPI on QI and Patient Safety Education. He is course director of the HSE funded RCPI Quality Improvement and Leadership Post-Graduate certificate which has over 800 graduates and coached more than 250 improvement projects. He has contributed to national improvement projects including Irish Paediatric Early Warning System (PEWS), Situation Awareness for Everyone (SAFE), the HSE Patient Safety Strategy (2019-2024) and most recently the HSE’s Quality & Patient Safety Competency Navigator (2025). He is a visiting Research Fellow with the Centre for Innovative Human Systems (Human Factors) at Trinity College Dublin. He is an editor of the Oxford Handbook of Patient Safety (2022) and a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Quality Improvement (2024) and has several peer reviewed publications in the field. He is a regular host and contributor to QI and Patient safety webinars and podcasts in Ireland.

Professor Prashant Mahajan is a tenured Professor of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics at University of Michigan Medical School. He is the Founding Chair of the Emergency Medicine Research and Education network by Global Experts (E.M.E.R.G.E.), a global network of 20 academic emergency departments in more than 15 countries. (www.emergenetwork.org)

He is the past Chair, Section of Emergency Medicine for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Dr. Mahajan's overall research focuses on clinical decision making in austere circumstances. He investigates host immune response in pediatric infectious (sepsis) and inflammatory conditions (asthma). He studies how clinicians make decisions in the emergency department in real-time to enhance diagnostic safety and excellence. In this space, he develops and studies the impact of pragmatic prediction rules on health outcomes and assesses the impact of new technologies including extended reality and artificial intelligence in clinician education and care delivery. He has been continuously funded (NIH, AHRQ, NSF) for the past 25 years. He has received >$25 million in federal funding and has ~200 peer-reviewed publications.

He is the Co-Director of Fellowship of the Academic College of Emergency Experts in India in Pediatric Emergency Medicine and has been successful in bringing the practice of pediatric emergency medicine to India. He is the father of two daughters Arushi and Aditi, and his wife, Jayashree, is a pediatrician working in the emergency department at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Detroit.

Professor Deborah McNamara is President of RCSI and Consultant General & Colorectal Surgeon at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. She qualified from Trinity College Dublin and completed surgical training in Ireland and France, specializing in surgical management of colorectal cancer. She has extensive experience in all areas of general and colorectal surgery as well as endoscopy.

She was Programme Director of the National Higher Surgical Training Programme in General Surgery (2010-2013) and Clinical Director for Surgery at Beaumont Hospital (2014-2017). Her work as Chair of the Colorectal Cancer Guidelines and Clinical Leads groups of the Irish National Cancer Control Programme (2011-2024) lead to the publication of the first National Clinical Guidelines for colon and rectal cancer, endorsed by the Minister for Health as national policy. In 2017, she chaired the group that published the RCSI PROGRESS report, setting out an ambitious strategy to improve gender equality in surgery in Ireland. She served as Co-Lead of the National Clinical Programme for Surgery (2017-2024), leading large-scale healthcare improvement programmes in areas such as patient safety, operating theatre efficiency, surgical care pathways and models of care for surgical specialties. She has published more than 250 peer-reviewed research papers and has received national and international distinctions including the Patey Prize of the Surgical Research Society, the AWS Olga Jonasson Award, the Millin Lecture and Honorary Fellowships from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and the American College of Surgeons.