Niall qualified as a doctor from Trinity College, Dublin in 1993. He trained as a surgeon in Belfast and received his FRCSI in 1997. He was a trainee in cardio-thoracic surgery working as an SHO in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast before returning to Dublin where he worked as a registrar in the National Cardiac Surgery Unit in the Mater Hospital and Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin.
He subsequently retrained as an airline pilot with Aer Lingus in 1999 and combined aviation with medicine by working as an Accident & Emergency doctor for six years before focusing fully on aviation. After operating as a co-pilot on both the European and Trans-Atlantic fleets, he qualified as a captain in 2010. He is currently operating out of their Manchester base on the Airbus A330 Trans-Atlantic fleet.
In 2011, Niall formed Frameworkhealth Ltd, a company providing aviation-style safety training modified specifically for healthcare which draws on his thirty-five years of experience between both industries. The company has since evolved into Framework Safety Group Ltd. This project aims to share aviation’s Safety Management System blended with Human Factors and Evolutionary Psychology with healthcare and other industries in order to address the huge issue of Adverse Events, usually caused by systemic faults but often blamed on the last individual to have touched the ball. Niall aims to encourage industries, especially healthcare to adopt a Just Culture, embed a systemic Human Factors approach and empower staff, patients and their families to speak up as part of the crew. His approach is based on the premise that technology and society have evolved faster in the last century than the human brain can accommodate so we need to adapt to account for this in order to reduce the number of adverse events. He has spoken at many conferences locally, nationally and internationally on the topic.
Niall has contributed articles both to specialist journals and national newspapers such as The Irish Times. He has also given interviews for national television including RTE TV News and Virgin Media and has been interviewed several times on BBC Radio. In 2016, Niall was appointed an Expert Advisor to the Northern Ireland Executive’s Dept of Health following a well received TEDx talk in Stormont’s Great Hall.
Niall cycled at national level for thirteen years and at pro-am international level for several years in the early 90s and was a member of Northern Ireland’s Commonwealth Games panel. He subsequently worked as Medical Officer for both the Federation of Irish Cyclists (now Cycling Ireland) and the Ulster Cycling Federation. He also worked as a Race Doctor at international level for six years.
In 2023, Niall had his first book, ‘Oops! Why Things Go Wrong’ published which explored the increasingly topical issue of error across industry and society generally and most importantly, how to address it. The book is already in it’s second print run after a higher than anticipated demand.
The success of the book has led to many invitations from outside healthcare, hence Frameworkhealth’s evolution into Framework Safety Group Ltd in recognition of this broadening scope.
