Safer Better Healthcare By All For All
Speakers, Panellists and Moderators
Speakers
Dr Deliya Banda Wesley
Senior Director, Health Equity at Mathematica
Keynote plenary speaker at HEPS2025 on Friday 20th June
Dr Deliya Wesley (Phd, MPH) is a health equity scientist who has spent her career applying a deep understanding of health equity to push the needle on systems transformation and policy change in health systems. As a health equity researcher and strategist, she has led the design, development and evaluation of complex health interventions serving people from historically disinvested and marginalized communities. Following a career as an embedded health services researcher working closely with healthcare human factors engineers and patient safety researchers she now serves as the senior director, health equity at Mathematica where she leads strategic growth of the health equity practice.
Dr. Mary Beth Privitera
M.Design, PhD, FIDSA
Keynote plenary speaker at HEPS2025 on Thursday 19th June
Co-Chair & Faculty, Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation Human Engineering Committee
Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Cincinnati
Honorary Professor, University of Nottingham
Fulbright Scholar US-UK 2022-23
Dr. Mary Beth Privitera, M.Design, FIDSA, is internationally known as an expert in medical product design, specifically in the area of applied human factors. She serves as faculty and co-chair of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation’s Human Engineering Committee. This committee is responsible for writing all human factors standards recognized by the FDA; adopted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and determines the US position on international ergonomic standards such as IEC/ISO.
Privitera also holds an appointment as Professor at the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and works collaboratively with the Colleges of Medicine, Engineering and Design. She is Co-Founder of the Medical Device Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program. Her previous academic appointments include the College of Design, Art, Architecture & Planning (Industrial Design) and within the College of Medicine (Department of Emergency Medicine). In addition, she is an Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham, Human Factors Group
Siri Wiing
Professor of Quality and Safety in Healthcare Systems
Keynote speaker at HEPS2025 on Friday 20th June
Siri Wiig, PhD, MSc, is Professor and Centre Director at SHARE - Centre for Resilience in Healthcare, at the University of Stavanger (UiS), Norway. The SHARE Centre is the largest research group in Norway doing research on quality and safety in healthcare. Wiig is a safety scientist by background and full Professor of Quality and Safety in Healthcare Systems at the Faculty of Health Sciences, UiS. Wiig is Adjunct Professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway and Honorary Professor at Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, Australia and at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Wiig’s key research interests are resilience in healthcare, patient safety, quality improvement, safety investigations, risk regulation, leadership, and learning in socio-technical systems.
Wiig has been involved in multiple research project and is currently leading the Research Council of Norway project Resilience in Healthcare (RiH) (2018-2024) (5 million Euro). The RiH project has developed a new theoretical and translational framework for resilience and includes an international comparative study across six countries. The RIH project let up the EU Horizon Europe project Support4Resilience (S4R)-Strengthening resilience and mental wellbeing through the Support4Resilience toolbox for leaders in elderly care (2024-2028) (6 mill Euro). UiS/SHARE Centre is coordinator of the consortium of 14 partners from 9 countries, and Wiig is leading the S4R project and consortium. Both projects focus on a multilevel understanding of resilience in healthcare and translation of knowledge into practice
Panellists
Maureen Nolan
Member of Patient Safety Ireland (PFPSI)
Maureen Nolan is a member of Patient Safety Ireland (PFPSI), since its formation in January 2013 under a World Health Organisation programme. PFPSI Champions sit at many HSE service development and quality improvement tables as full and equal partners and advocate for person centred care through collaboration with all stake holders, including the patient across all levels of policy development, implementation, evaluation, design and delivery of services.
As a Patient Voice Maureen is passionate about patient consultation and the need for involvement in their own care and decision making in relation to their health journeys, interventions and wellbeing. An involvement in the safety of patients for more than two decades in a professional capacity both in the public sector and private sector has provided the valuable attribute of seeing the health services and related systems from both sides.
Person Centred Care MUST become the norm not only on paper and in theory but in practise and real life. A life changing trauma involving a family member has resulted in experiences which carried over into patient safety role as a patient representative. Avoidable system failures, poor communication and disconnection by service providers from the person at the centre of it all, resulted in considerable consequences.
Moderators
Prof. Thomas Jun
Ph.D C.ErgHF FHEA
Thomas Jun is a Professor of Sociotechnical System Design at Loughborough University. He has been promoting systems thinking to safety incident investigation through award-winning animation/film production (www.systemsthinkinglab.com) and recently involved in training over 800 patient safety specialists in the NHS on system safety/resilience engineering. He is currently leading an NIHR-funded research project developing human-centred AI for people with learning disabilities and multiple long-term conditions (2022-25), DECODE.
Prof. Melissa Baysari
PhD CPE FAIDH
Professor Melissa Baysari leads the Digital Health Human Factors Group at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her team apply human factors methods and approaches to evaluate and optimise health technologies to support healthcare work and improve patient safety. Melissa’s work seeks to understand and improve the interactions between healthcare providers, health technologies and organisations, and she is particularly interested in evaluating and ensuring the usability and safety of health technologies, and minimising unintended consequences following implementation. She has published widely (>175 publications) in the areas of medication safety, electronic medical record systems and decision support, she has secured over AUD $25Mill in research funding, and her research has resulted in a number of significant changes being made to clinical information systems, as well as to hospital policy and work practices.
Dr. Susan Hallbeck
PhD, PE, CPE, FHFES, FIEA
Dr. Susan Hallbeck is the Scientific Director of Human Factors Engineering and Professor of Health Care Systems Engineering in the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Center for the Science of Healthcare Delivery and a Consultant in Health Care Delivery Research, as well as a Consultant in Surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Dr. Hallbeck is a Past-President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. She is currently the President of the Society for Surgical Ergonomics. Dr. Hallbeck is a licensed Professional Engineer and a Certified Professional Ergonomist.
Prior to joining Mayo Clinic, Dr. Hallbeck was a professor at the University of Nebraska in Industrial Engineering for 25 years and is now an emerita professor there. Dr. Hallbeck is an elected Fellow of both the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the International Ergonomics Association. Dr. Hallbeck has over 300 peer-reviewed articles. She is on the editorial boards of Applied Ergonomics and Human Factors in Health Care and a society representative and guest editor for the American Journal of Surgery.
Please note that this agenda is subject to change.
For more information, please email us at HEPS2025@abbey.ie
Social Programme
Thank you for your interest in HEPS 2025.
More information on the social programme coming soon.