Projects on improving access to vaccinations against shingles, preparing older patients for kidney transplants and the avoidance of inappropriate cell testing in laboratory settings have been announced as the winners of the inaugural High Potential Innovation Awards by the Graduate School of Healthcare Management at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, in partnership with the HSE Spark Innovation Programme.

The awards are a new initiative that supports and advances transformative solutions for healthcare delivery and patient care. The winning projects were chosen from ideas developed by participants of RCSI’s MSc in Leadership and Innovation in Healthcare. Each of the winners will receive funding and support to progress their idea with their associated organisation.

The winning projects are:

• Sarah Gleeson – Breaking Barriers: A Nurse-Led Vaccination Model Eliminating Financial Obstacles to Essential Shingles Protection for Ireland's Most Vulnerable IBD Patients
• Dr John Holland – OK POP: Older Kidney Patient Optimisation Pre-transplant
• Isabelle Delachapelle – Could the Introduction of a Demand Management System Reduce Inappropriate Testing in our Inmmunophenotyping Service?

“The participants in RCSI’s online MSc in Leadership and Innovation in Healthcare are practising clinicians, doctors, nurses, interdisciplinary health and social care professionals, healthcare managers and administrators,” said Dr Gloria Kirwan, Programme Director and Senior Lecturer, RCSI School of Graduate Healthcare Management.

“The High Potential Innovation Awards provide an ideal environment for developing and testing new ideas and initiatives from a broad range of perspectives. Sarah Gleeson’s project has the potential to broaden the delivery of vaccination for patients with irritable bowel disease, and Dr John Holland has developed an assessment pathway for treating older adults with kidney failure awaiting transplant. Both are worthy recipients of RCSI bursaries, and alongside HSE Spark Innovation Programme bursary recipient Isabelle Delachapelle’s work on laboratory efficiency, they demonstrate programme participants’ widespread appetite and capability for improving healthcare systems and patient outcomes.”

Caitriona Heffernan, National Clinical Innovation Lead, HSE Spark said: “HSE Spark enables healthcare workers to develop solutions to improve our health service, and when we announced our involvement in the High Potential Innovation Awards we asked for a pipeline of creative and staff-led ideas, solutions and practices.

“Isabelle Delachapelle’s project answers this call perfectly as she takes a real-world, everyday problem – avoiding inappropriate testing in laboratory settings – and offers a potential solution that aims to increase efficiency and reduce the unnecessary use of resources. We aim to nurture the leadership capability of people like Isabelle and other individuals and teams working across the health service to deliver safer, better healthcare, and this is a significant step in the process of health service improvement.”

Sara McDonnell, Executive Director, RCSI Graduate School of Management and RCSI Online said: “The RCSI Graduate School of Healthcare Management offers practical, actionable solutions for healthcare professionals and their organisations. These awards show once again that our students and graduates are leading change and delivering immediate, real-world improvements in healthcare.

“Congratulations to Sarah, John and Isabelle, who have stepped forward with developments in the fields of vaccine accessibility, kidney treatment and laboratory efficiency and met our request for a ‘substantial enhancement of current service delivery’. This mission is shared across our prospectus of 23 programmes, all of which are delivered online and globally, and have a core objective of increasing efficiency and improving patient outcomes.”

Each of the winners will receive bursaries of €3,000, two of which are funded by RCSI and open to all students of the University’s MSc in Leadership and Innovation in Healthcare. The third bursary is funded by HSE Spark for employees of the HSE or a Section 38 organisation in Ireland.