13th June 2025
Congratulations to Kieran Devine on being recognised in the King’s Birthday Honours List. Kieran has 36 years of dedicated service in the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) and has held several operational posts across the service, and currently holds the role of Duty Control Manager. He is an outstanding individual, with exceptional leadership skills and has always had an enormous impact in NIAS.
As Control Training Officer, Kieran played a lead role in the introduction of the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System, fundamentally changing the way in which 999 calls were triaged, enabling life-threatening emergency calls to achieve faster responses through prioritisation of resources. Crucially, for the first time, the system enabled the dispatcher to provide potentially lifesaving instructions to the caller whilst assistance is awaited. Kieran led the comprehensive training programme for this transformative programme. As a champion of learning and capability development, he supported staff to gain the skills and knowledge required to improve outcomes for patients in the prehospital environment.
Kieran has 36 years of dedicated service in the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) and has held several operational posts across the service, and currently holds the role of Duty Control Manager. He is an outstanding individual with exceptional leadership skills and has always had an enormous impact in NIAS.
Kieran’s focus has always been on delivering the highest level of patient care to those who require an emergency response at the most vulnerable times of their lives, and he has represented the service in regional initiatives to improve care to those requiring emergency services. This has included collaboration with HSC Trusts to improve the timeliness of response for patients requiring interfacility transfer from one hospital to another for life saving intervention, introduction of call taking processes in the control room to improve access for patients with laryngectomies and in the development of the Northern Ireland Specialist Transport and Retrieval combined critical care transfer service which provides advanced resuscitation, stabilisation and inter-hospital transfer of critically ill infants, children and adults.
Having held various operational and clinical roles before moving to his current role as Duty Control Manager within the Emergency Ambulance Operation Centre, Kieran has invaluable ‘lived experience’ which he harnesses to support his colleagues. He demonstrates empathy and understanding when navigating the daily challenges of balancing the risk of prioritising response to patients whilst ensuring staff welfare. He is widely respected and trusted by frontline colleagues.
Kieran was a key member of the team involved in the development of Northern Ireland’s marauding terrorist capability. He is a measured and experienced head when developing exercises, sharing knowledge within the control room, through scenario-based training, to ensure preparedness, and when supporting operational paramedic staff gain essential skills through training.
Kieran is the only DCM in NIAS to undertake National Inter-Agency Liaison Officer training, a role that he further developed through his commitment to service wide resilience and preparedness training with blue light partners.
Acknowledging the impact of traumatic incidents experienced by staff, Kieran completed the Critical Incident Stress Management training course in 2021 to develop skills required to support colleagues, post-trauma. His care and authenticity are described as being second to none. He is a special person who naturally encourages others to ‘open up’ and his wisdom always brings a sense of calm to a situation that can initially feel helpless and impossible. As a credible manager and a leader, Kieran has changed the face of psychological care in his workplace. He is highly valued in our Ambulance Service.
Congratulations Kieran, time to take a bow!