National Clinical Lead of Quality and Patient Safety, HSE; Ireland

A graduate of UCC, Orla worked in hospital medicine for five years before embarking in a career in Public Health Medicine. She has occupied a range of senior executive and clinical leadership roles at regional and national levels in the health services including Director of Quality, Governance and Patient Safety, Director of Strategy, Planning and Population Health and Chief Operations Officer. In 2018, she was made Adjunct Clinical Professor in the School of Public Health UCC.

Since taking up post as National Clinical Lead of Quality and Patient Safety in the HSE in April 2021, Orla has reconfigured the Corporate Quality and Patient Safety, to deliver on the organisations Patient Safety Strategy. The vision of NQPS for patient safety is that all patients using health and social care services will consistently receive the safest care possible by:

Building quality and patient safety capacity and capability in practice
Using data to inform improvements
Developing and monitoring the incident management framework and open disclosure policy and guidance
Providing a platform for sharing and learning; reducing common causes of harm and enabling safe systems of care and sustainable improvements.


Orla leads the following teams:
QPS Improvement (including National Medication Safety Programme, National Clinical Programme for Sepsis, Deteriorating Patient Improvement Programme, National Improvement Programme for Wound Management)
QPS Intelligence
QPS Incident Management
QPS Education
QPS Connect
National Centre for Clinical Audit