Maria (Rhia) Fernandez
Maria (Rhia), an internationally educated nurse from the Philippines, began working in the Renal and Transplant department at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in 2000. She is the Lead Nurse for Renal Transplant Services. A specialist nurse providing outstanding holistic care and service.
Her extensive experience focuses on pre and post kidney transplant as well as donation pathways. She passionately promotes research and quality improvement, leading numerous projects including streamlining transplant workup pathways, establishing a nurse-led clinic for post-transplant follow-up in the community, and developing and integrating the first electronic referral for transplant workup to the Tableau information reporting portal, attracting national interest.
She advocates for career support and professional growth of her colleagues, supporting a well-equipped and skilled workforce to deliver the best care for the patient community. She places high emphasis on service users and the improvement of care delivery as well as identifying innovation through co-production.
A dedicated collaborator for LKN, RSTP, KQuIP, ANN UK and UKKA. Rhia holds the Gold Award for BJN’s Renal Nurse of the Year 2024.
Sarah Ryder
Sarah qualified as a nurse in 2001 and worked in urology and intensive care before returning to renal. Since 2023 she works as a Renal transplant specialist nurse at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHSFT serving a population of around 700,000.
Gloucester is a referring centre, referring patients to Bristol and Oxford. Within her role she looks after patients in various stages of work up prior to transplant. They currently have 60 patients active and a further 80 in work up. Sarah also looks after them post-transplant and currently has around 320 post-transplant patients. She runs nurse led annual review clinics, has set up immunosuppressant home delivery and manages a telephone advice service. Previously she worked as a Peritoneal dialysis specialist nurse. Sarah manages a team of renal specialist nurses and is the team manager for Gloucestershire Adults transplant games team.
Away from work she enjoys hockey and running half marathons.