Sally Shiels

Sally is a consultant anaesthetist who joined the OxSTaR team as a fellow in 2019. She trained as a graduate-entry medical student in Oxford University after completing her BSc in Physiology and Pharmacology from University College Dublin and following two years of clinical research in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard University.

Sally’s educational career started in 2011 when she helped to set up RIACT (Readiness for Initial Assessment of Competency Training), a course for novice anaesthetic and ICU doctors. Sally has also established multi-professional courses across the region aimed at managing the unanticipated difficult airway in Reading and Milton Keynes. More recently, she developed the SCOOP simulation course in Oxford for managing the post-operative neck bleed. 

As an education fellow at OxSTaR, she conducted research into the use of virtual reality to teach clinical students medical decision-making skills in the emergency setting. The project took on a new angle during the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic and with the help of 2 clinical students (Amy Irvine and Sarah Flaherty) who set up a virtual education platform with a supporting curriculum for the clinical students of Oxford Medical School. The current virtual reality project is expanding the role of virtual reality in delivering bedside teaching and multi-professional training. 

Her current focus in OxSTaR is in establishing a regional Safety-2 and Appreciative Inquiry Development Programme which uses the principles of asset-based training to explore how to learn from what works, rather than solely learning from mistakes.