Dr Cathal O’Keeffe is Deputy Director and Head of Clinical Risk at the State Claims Agency where he leads the Clinical Risk Unit, which works in partnership with key stakeholders to advance safety in health and social care delivery. He is a member of the Independent Patient Safety Council, the National Clinical Effectiveness Committee and the Safety and Quality Committee of the HSE Board.

Previously he practiced as a Consultant Gastroenterologist. He also has extensive experience in the not-for-profit sector having worked with a number of different overseas development agencies on health and education programmes in sub-Saharan Africa.

Professor Dara Byrne is the HSE National Clinical Lead for Simulation and the Professor of Simulation at the University of Galway. She heads up the recently established National Simulation Office (NSO) in Ireland.

She is also the Director of Simulation at the Irish Centre for Applied Patient Safety and Simulation (ICAPSS), which is an award winning dual accredited simulation facility located on a clinical site.

Professor Byrne has over 25 years' experience in delivering high quality simulation-based interprofessional education. Over the course of her academic career, she has sustained a strong record of achievement in medical education and patient safety research and scholarship.

Dr Professor Anthony Gallagher is currently Director of Research and Learning at the ORSI (robotic surgery) Academy in Melle, Belgium and Visiting Professor at KU Leuven in Belgium (Faculty of Medicine) and Ulster University (Faculty of Health and Life Sciences).

He was the first academic from Ireland to be awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship at Yale University (2000 – 2001).

Over the past two decades he has led the global paradigm shift in proficiency-based progression simulation training for surgical and procedural skills.

Lisa Fallon has managed football teams in Ireland and England and became the first female head coach of a UK or Irish professional men’s football team with Galway United in 2021.

She is a UEFA Pro Licence holder and currently works in FIFA’s Global Football Development Division, under Arsene Wenger, and has been a coach analyst for various football organisations. In her current role, she combines tournament coaching observations with the data provided by Football Analysis to establish the current trends in the modern game for all FIFA tournaments.

Specialising in Tactical Game Strategies, and Culture in High-Performing teams; she was the first female football pundit on Irish TV and is highly regarded as one of the best football analysts in the country. In addition, she is a Board Member of Paralympics Ireland, is Chair of their High-Performance Committee and is in her second term on Sport Ireland's Women In Sport committee and chairs their coaching working group.

Professor Oscar Traynor is the Director of International Surgical Training Programmes at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. For more than 25 years, he was the Dean of Postgraduate Surgical Education and Training with responsibility for all surgical training in Ireland. He has been responsible for introducing several innovations to surgical training, including the world’s first e-learning programme for surgical trainees, a comprehensive curriculum based surgical simulation programme for teaching technical skills and an integrated Human Factors training programme.

He has published widely on various aspects of surgical training and has also lectured extensively on the subject of Human Factors in Surgery in Europe, Australia and North America. In October 2021, he was given an Honorary Fellowship of the American College of Surgeons in recognition of his contributions to surgical education and training. In September 2022, he became the first Irish surgeon to be inducted into the Academy of Master Surgeon Educators in the United States.

Until recently, he was also the Director of Clinical Governance at Blackrock Health Hermitage Medical Clinic in Dublin, a post he held since 2014. In this role, he was responsible for patient safety and quality of care at the hospital and he promoted various patient safety initiatives. Through the Clinical Governance Committee, he achieved wide stakeholder involvement in promoting the “culture of patient safety” at Hermitage.

Professor Traynor retired from clinical practice as a consultant surgeon at St Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin in 2014. For more than 25 years, he headed a very busy Hepato-Biliary and Pancreatic Surgery unit and played a leading role in developing the National Liver Transplant Programme in Ireland in the early 1990s. The HPB unit at St Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin is the sole national tertiary referral centre for Liver Transplantation and for Pancreas Cancer surgery in Ireland.