Inaugural nursing award presented

THE inaugural memorial award in honour of a Ballyvaughan nurse was presented this week to a Clare woman nursing in University College Hospital in Galway.
On Tuesday, Sharon Cassidy from Belkelly, Tuamgraney became the first recipient of Anna-May Driscoll Foundation Learning Bursary.
The Anna May Driscoll Foundation was set up to commemorate the work that Anna May Driscoll from Murrough in Ballyvaughan pioneered in leadership in the corporate and voluntary sectors before her death from cancer two years ago.
Having originally qualified as a children’s nurse, Anna May became a leading management consultant in the area of behaviour and organisation change. She worked with clients in Europe, Asia, and North America.
Anna May left Clare at 16 years of age and qualified as a paediatric nurse at St Mary’s in Paddington. She worked in the Princess Louise Hospital Kensington and her work in ante-natal and post-natal clinics led her to working in family planning and from this into psycho-sexual counselling.
Anna May was instrumental in founding the family-planning clinic in Limerick at a time when most methods of family planning were illegal in Ireland. She led team building and personal development workshops for a number of voluntary organisations, including the Samaritans before subsequently returning to full-time education and earning a degree in social psychology before studying for a masters in organisational behaviour in London. 
Anna May became a founding partner of Emerge, an international management consultancy specialising in organisation development.
According to a spokesman for the company, she pioneered its work in leadership and personal effectiveness. She brought her skills as a trained counsellor and manager to bear on the practical challenges facing executives in private and public-sector organisations. She led change projects with major companies across the globe. She developed Emerge’s work in the skills of coaching for performance improvement and offered the first training courses in this area in Western Europe.”
Emerge Education established the Anna May Driscoll Foundation in memory of its founding partner to promote the concept of responsibility-based leadership that she created with her partner, Damien Dyar. The award in particular promotes the development of this form of leadership. This initial bursary has been piloted in co-operation with University Hospital Galway to promote the continuing development of nurses at the hospital.
Colleagues from Galway’s University Hospital nominated East Clare woman Sharon Cassidy, a former student of Scariff Community College, along with four others for the award.
Nominations were made based on the leadership exhibited by candidates in their day-to-day work at the hospital.
Each nominee was interviewed to find out how the candidate would use the award to build their learning and leadership skills. 
The panel was impressed with the strong responsibility-based leadership skills shown by all the nominees and declared that any one of them could have been a winner but, ultimately, decided that Sharon displayed the best combination of taking responsibility and capability of using the bursary to build her knowledge and skills.
Like Anna May, Sharon’s influence has extended worldwide, proven when she worked and travelled around Australia and New Zealand in 2004. In 2008, Sharon completed a postgraduate diploma in pre-operative care and is currently undertaking a masters from NUIG while working full time, specialising in the cardiothoracic theatre.
The award was presented to Sharon at a ceremony on Tuesday at the University College Hospital by Damien Dyar, Anna-May Driscoll’s partner.