Our Stories of Impact

• New report finds that government response to climate crisis is worsening inequalities for women and marginalised people.
• Energy poverty, housing poverty, food poverty, mobility and spatial injustices risk being exacerbated by the climate crisis and policy responses.
• The report was led by UCC researchers for Feminist Communities for Climate Justice, a joint project between the National Women’s Council of Ireland and Community Work Ireland.

• Significant delays between patient referral and their first clinic visit.
• Insufficient communication and information-sharing was evident.
• PD nurse specialists post are lacking nationwide.

• UCC study assessed the potential of care co-operatives in Ireland.
• The care co-operative model provides an alternative option to supporting older people to age well at home.
• In Ireland, most older people prefer to remain in their own homes, or, at least, in their own communities rather than in institutional settings, as they age.
• Study recommends the development of state-supported pilot actions to trial the development of care co-operatives.

• Drug commonly used to treat HER2-positive breast cancer sees tumour shrinkage in several other cancer types.
• Cancer treatment combination may have more uses than previously thought.

Lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the gut microbiome development of babies born during these periods according to new research from APC Microbiome Ireland (APC), a world leading SFI Research Centre, based in University College Cork, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and Children’s Health Ireland.

• Review finds no increase in suicide rate during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• A range of factors during the pandemic served as protective effects to the risk of suicide.
• Study also highlights the need for high-quality and timely data on suicide deaths worldwide.

A 280-million-year-old fossil that has baffled researchers for decades has been shown to be, in part, a forgery following new examination of the remnants. The discovery has led the team led by Dr Valentina Rossi of University College Cork, Ireland (UCC) to urge caution in how the fossil is used in future research.

Treatment in a recent study combined a histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor - a drug that causes a chemical change to stop tumor cells from dividing - with two types of immunotherapy known as checkpoint inhibitors, which unharness the power of the immune response against cancer.