Rising Star: Kieron Connolly

Kieron Connolly is the 2025 recipient of the RCSI Rising Star Award for his passion and ambition in his chosen career as a clinical specialist physiotherapist. Read Kieron's story below.

I was always interested in physiotherapy as a career – I was always sports-mad, loved exercise and understanding how the body works. I had physiotherapy as my first choice in the CAO, but didn’t get the points and instead I did a degree in Exercise and Sports Management in UCD knowing that it might provide a steppingstone into physiotherapy.

I learned a lot from the course and when I started out as a mature student in RCSI, I found I had a bit of an upper hand due to it. I am a firm believer that if you want something badly enough you can make it happen.

When I first started studying physiotherapy I always imagined I’d end up working with a team. The type of teamwork I had in mind involved sports physiotherapy, but as I continued in my degree, I did several placements and began to experience and appreciate the range of different opportunities that exist for physiotherapists.

I think it was the placements I did in the hospital setting that opened my eyes to a different type of team involvement. I loved the buzz of the environment, the variety of patients as well as the team structure. Working with different professionals from doctors to occupational therapists to clinical nutritionists was hugely exciting – I was able to tap into their wealth of knowledge, to learn something new every day.

After graduation, I started in private practice, but when the opportunity for a position arose in Beaumont, I jumped at it. Since then, I’ve done a bit of a tour of Dublin, working in Beaumont, Tallaght and James’s, where I am based currently as a Clinical Specialist Physiotherapist on the Frailty Intervention Team within the Emergency Department.

Within the team we have all been trained to do a basic assessment of patients regardless of our area of specialty. So, when a patient presents to the Emergency Department having had a fall, one of us will conduct the assessment – as a physiotherapist I’ll ask questions relating to their physiology, but I’ll also ask questions about their social scenario, their nutrition etc. It's almost like a bit of detective work. Once I’ve completed an assessment, I can then identify whether the patient needs to engage further with a different member of the team whether the clinical nutritionist or the occupational therapist, etc.

On a given day, one team member might see four or five different individuals while another team member might just work with one patient, spending time ringing family members, contacting care agencies or community services. It's incredibly varied.

The structure of the team maximises efficiency, but our overall objective is to assess whether we need to admit a person or whether we can support from home. Our team would be aware of the concept of ‘PJ paralysis’, which is this theory that once you’re in your pyjamas you tend to be less active ... and you don’t need to work in a hospital to know that a lot of those admitted wear their pyjamas. It is an unfortunate statistic that when a person aged over 75 years is admitted to hospital, they are more than likely within their last thousand days of life. So, our team works to try and ensure that people who can be treated in the setting of their own home or by services in the community are not admitted.

Assisting and challenging

I really enjoy working with older people. My patients who are aged 70 or older grew up in a very different era – when they were 20 or 30 years of age gyms were unheard of, they still smoked in the pub and could drink and drive! It’s important for me as a professional to understand this and to recognise that they didn’t have the same level of health education or information as people do nowadays.

People often throw the phrase ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ at me, but I’ve found this isn’t the case. Most older people are very receptive to changing their behaviour, especially as they appreciate that it can make the difference between spending time in hospital or at home.

Behavioural change is never easy, so you have to adopt the approach of challenging their perceptions while also providing them with the support and information to make change. A lot of the work focuses on building their confidence and empowering them, which I really enjoy.

Personally, I also enjoy challenging myself and that probably drove me to say yes to doing a research master's into the prevalence and associated factors of sarcopenia in older adults attending a day hospital service. It helped immensely that I received a postgraduate employment-based grant from the Irish Research Council so that I could stay listed as an employee of St James’s while completing my research with RCSI, which is very rare.

I always enjoyed research and did more than one Research Summer School projects when I was doing my undergrad, but the master's was a different experience – I ended up publishing two journal articles and was also invited to speak at an international conference last year.

Piano man

Connecting with people, particularly older people, gives me a great buzz. I enjoy knowing that I can help make their lives a bit better, a bit brighter. A few years back I was based on an acute ward, and I ended up treating a gentleman who’d had a major operation.

I looked after him after the operation but shortly after he was transferred to a rehab ward. I didn’t think much more about it until I ended up covering a colleague’s leave on that same rehab ward. I treated him daily and we started to build up a great relationship.

While he was doing well physically, I realised that he was feeling pretty low and needed a bit of encouragement. Over the course of our chats, I learned he loved music and enjoyed playing the piano. I knew there was a piano on the ground floor of the rehab building in St James’s, so I made a deal with him: once he could walk down to the ground floor with me, he could play the piano.

It was like he got a renewed sense of purpose but when he first reached the piano, he was so tired that he kept making mistakes and losing concentration. But day by day, he began to improve and then Roisín Nevins who is the Creative Life Coordinator in St James’ suggested that he invite his grandson in to play alongside him and we’d make a bit of a fuss about it.

The day his grandson arrived in, he made his way downstairs and sat down beside him to play the piano. I remember the shock when I turned around halfway through the performance expecting to see five or six people in the area and instead there was a crowd of about 50 people. It was incredibly moving – seeing his sense of achievement and pride, seeing the joy he got from playing with his grandson.

It was probably one of those key life moments where you have a realisation that will stay with you forever – for me it was realising that as a physiotherapist one of the best things I can do is to figure out what makes them tick and use that to motivate and empower them to recover.