Dr Chris Soraghan is a Senior Medical Physicist, from the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering (MPBE) in MISA at St James’s Hospital Dublin. He completed his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering at Maynooth University, followed there by a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering, developing a multichannel brain-computer interface to enable people to communicate who have lost all voluntary motor control. Since joining St James’s Hospital Chris has provided support to technologies for ageing and other medical devices used to provide patient treatment. He has also worked in Design and Innovation over the past 10 years, and coordinates an annual design challenge sprint at the hospital – SJH Design Week – in collaboration with the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) and with the support of the HSE Spark Innovation Programme.

Funding from the DPER Public Service Innovation Fund has been used to equip a design/maker space at St James’s Hospital with the tools and materials needed to build and design prototype solutions to healthcare design challenges, and to subcontract the manufacture of more advanced designs.

Over the past decade, St James’s Hospital has developed a programme to enable frontline staff apply design thinking to solve frontline challenges. In 2021, the Design Innovation Lab at SJH appointed Ireland’s first Designer in Residence at a public hospital in a joint initiative between SJH and HSE Spark, enabling further year-round product and service design developments with frontline staff.