Prof. Oscar Traynor is the professor of postgraduate surgical education and dean of postgraduate surgical education and training at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), Dublin.
Professor Traynor graduated in 1974 from University College Dublin School of Medicine with honors and completed his basic and senior surgical training with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He was the recipient of numerous awards during his surgical training and was recognized with the O’Farrell Gold Medal in Surgery, the McArdle Prize in Clinical Surgery, and a Fogarty Foundation Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. He was awarded the 1984 President’s Prize for his research by the Surgical Section of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland and was the first recipient of the RCSI Surgical Travelling Fellowship in 1985.
Prior to his current position, he was appointed in 1987 as consultant hepatobiliary surgeon at St. Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin and became the founder and director of the Irish Liver Transplant Program and director of the National Surgical Training Centre in 1990. His clinical interests have been focused around hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery, including liver transplantation. For more than 25 years, he headed up the busy hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery unit at St. Vincent’s, an active teaching hospital affiliated with University College Dublin. Under his leadership, this unit became and remains the sole national tertiary referral center for complex hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgical and liver transplantation problems in Ireland. His unit, in conjunction with the Department of Health, also played a leading role in the 1990 development of Ireland’s National Liver Transplant Program. During his tenure, he recruited and trained faculty and developed protocols and best practice guidelines. This center has now performed hundreds of liver transplant procedures with outcomes matching the best results in the U.K. and Europe.
Retiring in 2014 from a busy clinical surgical practice, he has remained intimately involved in surgical education through his work at the Royal College and is responsible for educational development of the more than 500 surgical trainees in the country. He initiated and led the development of many changes in the delivery of postgraduate surgical training and education, introducing several innovations to surgical training in Ireland, including the world’s first e-learning program for surgical trainees; a comprehensive, curriculum-based surgical simulation program for teaching technical skills; and an integrated human factors training program. He has published widely on various aspects of surgical training and has lectured in Europe, Australia, and North America extensively on the subject of human factors in surgery.
He also is director of clinical governance at Hermitage Medical Clinic in Dublin, a post he has held since 2014, with responsibility for patient safety and quality of care at the hospital. He has promoted various patient safety initiatives, including the Patient Safety First campaign and, through the Clinical Governance Committee, has achieved wide stakeholder involvement in promoting the culture of patient safety. Additionally, he is director and co-founder of i360 Medical, a medical device innovation company based in Dublin with a large international footprint that provides a “one-stop shop” for medical device innovation from initial ideation continuing through to commercialization and clinical practice.
