Margaret Murphy

Following the death of her son as a result of medical error, Margaret Murphy has been actively involved as a patient safety advocate. Margaret is the External Lead Advisor for the World Health Organization’s Patients for Patient Safety, a network of 400 patient safety champions from 52 countries with 19 collaborating organizations.

The focus of her work relates to seeing adverse events as having the potential to be catalysts for change as well as being opportunities for learning, identifying areas for improvement and preventing recurrence.

She promotes this viewpoint at local, national and international levels as an invited presenter to conferences, hospital staffs and students. Her area of particular interest is education as a vehicle to achieve sustainable culture change.

Viewed as a resource for including the patient perspective in a variety of initiatives and a range of fora, Margaret has been invited to partner and collaborate in the areas of:

• Policy-making (Commission on Patient Safety & Quality Assurance and implementation steering group; member HSE National Risk Committee)
• Standard-setting (HIQA working group)
• Regulation (lay member, Irish Medical Council and serving on a number of committees),
• Education (Lectures to students – medical, nursing, radiation therapy, pharmacy, etc.)
• Research (Collaborator on EU Research Projects; Assessor final stage applications for NIHR funding)
• Conference speaker – often keynote (conferences, healthcare staffs, seminars, learning sets)
• Team member critical incident reviews
• Designated as one of seventy ISQua Experts in 2012
• Invited by Prof. the Lord Darzi of Denham to join an advisory group to scope, research and develop a paper on the subject of patient empowerment and make recommendations to senior policy makers for presentation at the Global Health Policy Summit, Doha, 2013 and again in 2015.