I have the honour of making a very special address to make the early retirement of an exceptional colleague and friend of the School, Mairead Egan.
Mairead joined the School in 1995. In her first roles after joining, Mairead was Administrator for Academic General Practice and the EMS training section, she was then Practice Secretary for the Coombe Family Practice and then PA to the EMS Head of Section.
In 2001 Mairead was appointed Manager for the Centre for Emergency Medical Science and in 2019 she took over as Manager for the Section of General Practice, Forensic and Legal Medicine.
Since 2001, Mairead has designed, managed and driven extremely impactful work.
She was involved in the delivery of Immediate Care courses to GPs and their teams across Ireland for over 20 years and this work greatly enhanced the reputation of UCD School of Medicine amongst these healthcare professionals.
Mairead also played an integral role in establishing and managing the Medical Emergency Responders Integration and Training (MERIT) project which equips and trains GPs to respond to out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in their community.
This is particularly important in rural areas where ambulances have longer travel times to reach patients and when a responder can arrive on the scene quickly and is equipped to deal with this urgent situation, the chances of survival and a successful outcome increase significantly.
Mairead also organised Basic Life Support (BLS) training for university staff and students across the UCD community on ‘Restart a Heart’ Day over three years and in recognition of this significant effort, President Deeks presented her with a UCD Value’s in Action award for this work in 2017.
Mairead was part of the UCD team who, alongside the National Ambulance Service, delivered immediate care courses in Lahore, Pakistan and was part of the UCD Team who, in partnership with the Defence Forces, helped establish a first responder scheme in Sierra Leone in West Africa.
Mairead is also listed as co-author on over 30 peer-reviewed publications and has presented CEMS research locally and at European level.
In essence for the last 26 years, Mairead has won the respect of colleagues and partners across UCD, the National Ambulance Service, Dublin Fire Brigade, the Irish Defence Forces, the Civil Defence, Dublin Airport Fire & Rescue Service, and the GP and hospital consultant community. She has been an outstanding champion in driving the School’s vital role in providing pre-hospital emergency care education.
So Mairead can feel very proud of her career at UCD School of Medicine and especially proud of all paramedics and other healthcare professionals working in pre-hospital care settings that have been trained in our Centre for Emergency Medical Science. She can also feel that she played an integral part in our Centre for Emergency Care becoming the national academic centre for research, development and training in pre-hospital emergency care.