
Evolving Leadership in Healthcare: A Conversation with Caroline O’Regan
Leading with Hearts and MindsShow Notes
In this episode of Leading with Hearts and Minds, Marie Kilduff speaks with Caroline O’Regan, a respected leader in healthcare education and organisational development who has contributed significantly to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and the Health Service Executive (HSE).
Caroline reflects on more than three decades of experience in leadership development—charting how the focus in healthcare has shifted from hierarchical management to a more inclusive, collaborative, and compassionate approach that values communication, empathy, and systems thinking.
They discuss:
How leadership in healthcare has evolved over the decades The impact of Caroline’s work with RCSI on leadership education Preparing emerging leaders for complexity and change Why compassion and clarity remain at the heart of effective leadership
Presented by Marie Kilduff.
Produced by the National Clinical Leadership Centre for Nursing and Midwifery.
More from Leading with Hearts and Minds
To date, the NCLC podcast series Leading with Hearts and Minds has given listeners worldwide the chance to hear personal and professional leadership experiences from people working in healthcare and other sectors.
Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda became the second hospital in Ireland to achieve Pathway to Excellence — the international accreditation recognising nursing excellence, workplace culture, and shared decision-making.
St James's Hospital became the first hospital in Ireland to achieve Pathway to Excellence — an international accreditation from the American Nurses Credentialing Centre that recognises a genuinely positive working environment for nurses.
Petrina Donnelly has spent thirty-three years in nursing, from a hospital ward in Craigavon to one of Ireland's new Regional Director of Nursing and Midwifery posts. Ask how she got there, and the answer is rarely a plan — it's a series of people who encouraged her to take the next step before she felt ready. She talks to Marie Kilduff about the mentors who shaped her, what it's actually like to lead a brand-new region with no map and no handover, her vision for a genuinely integrated health service, and how a senior leader keeps going without running herself down, with a returning contribution from her former colleague Paul Gallagher, recorded before his retirement.
What does it take to nurse someone whose privacy is gone, whose environment magnifies every symptom, and whose relationship with the health system has, until now, been broken or absent? Enda Kelly has spent more than three decades finding out.