The healthcare landscape constantly faces complex challenges, demanding innovative solutions to enhance patient care and professional practice across the clinical frontline.

This episode delves into the world of healthcare innovation, exploring how nurses and midwives are uniquely positioned to drive meaningful change in service delivery, patient experience, and operational efficiency. The discussion highlights successful projects, including the use of virtual reality for pain management and digital apps for crucial communication. Listeners are given practical advice on how to turn their own ideas into funded, successful reality.

Host Kathyann Barrett, NMBI Head of Operations, is joined by two great innovators: Una Rogers, National Nursing and Midwifery Innovation Fellow, and Anna Marie Kiernan, Registered Advanced Nurse Practitioner in Pain Medicine and National Nursing & Midwifery Innovation Fellow.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

Una & Anna Marie’s career paths and new roles
COVID-19 as a driver for digital health
Innovation is about multidisciplinary collaboration
Human-centred design transforms services
Advice for frontline innovators

GUESTS DETAILS

UNA ROGERS:

Una is the National Nursing and Midwifery Innovation Fellow with the HSE Spark Innovation Programme. She is a Community Midwife Manager with over 12 years of experience, deeply committed to woman-centred, holistic maternity care. Una successfully led a Quality Improvement Project that used technology to enhance interpretation services in the Maternity Outpatients Department, improving patient satisfaction while reducing costs.

Contact Una:
linkedin: linkedin.com/in/una-rogers-200251280

ANNA MARIE KIERNAN:

Anna Marie is a Registered Advanced Nurse Practitioner (RANP) in Pain Medicine and a National Nursing & Midwifery Innovation Fellow with the HSE Spark Innovation Programme. She has successfully led service redesign initiatives, significantly reducing patient wait times for complex pain treatment. Anna Marie has also co-developed extended reality tools for chronic pain self-management and is focused on developing innovation literacy for frontline staff.

Contact Anna Maire:
Website: https://healthservice.hse.ie/staff/spark-innovation-programme/
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-marie-kiernan-69506a220

MORE INFORMATION

NMBI is the statutory body which sets the standards for the education, registration and professional conduct of nurses and midwives. We advise on how nurses and midwives should provide care to patients, their families and society. Our mission is to protect the public and the integrity of the professions of nursing and midwifery through the promotion of high standards of education, training, and professional conduct. We achieve this by providing leadership to registered nurses and midwives to support them to deliver safe care through innovative and proactive professional regulation.

Our functions in safeguarding the public involve establishing and maintaining the Register of Nurses and Midwives. We also establish procedures and criteria for the assessment and registration of nurses and midwives. Visit the Registration section of our website to learn more. Additionally, we set the standards and requirements for nursing and midwifery education programmes. We approve education programmes and further education programmes for the purposes for nurses and midwives. Visit NMBI.ie to learn more.

QUOTES

Innovation is about multidisciplinary collaboration with the human at the centre, always making sure that what we're doing is to improve the outcome for the patient, but also the profession. - Una Rogers
It's not thinking like, you know, you're out thinking outside of the box. It's thinking like there never was a box. - Una Rogers
I always say I go into a patient with a clean slate. I don't base my opinion on someone else's story. I create my own story with a patient. - Anna Marie Kiernan
I think the advice I would give would be to have a little bit of belief in yourself and confidence in yourself - Anna Marie Kiernan

KEYWORDS

Innovation, multidisciplinary collaboration, nursing and midwifery, patient outcomes, digital health, human-centered design, pain management, virtual reality, augmented reality