Poster Award at Health Service Executive Integrated Healthcare Conference 2025
Congratulations go to a team of School of Pharmacy researchers and colleagues in the Health Service Executive (HSE) for winning a poster award at this year’s HSE Integrated Healthcare Conference.
The poster won the award for the ‘HSE West North West’ region and was titled ‘Safety and Savings: Economic analysis of pharmacist-led person-centred medicines reviews in general practice’, which described a cost-benefit analysis of pharmacists in general practice settings providing person-centred medication reviews to patients prescribed 10 or more regular medications or patients at high risk of medication-related harm.
This economic study evaluated the medicines reviews that were conducted as part of the iSIMPATHY project, which involved the novel implementation of pharmacists performing person-centred medication reviews across multiple general practice settings in the Republic of Ireland. The two full-text publications from this collaboration thus far have shown that these reviews generated substantial cost savings, as well as improved both medication appropriateness and patient-reported outcome measures.
The team involved in this award-winning study include UCC School of Pharmacy researchers (Dr Kieran Dalton, Dr Cian O’Mahony, Dr Kevin Murphy, Prof Laura Sahm, and Prof Stephen Byrne), HSE pharmacists (Ciara Kirke, Clare Kinahan, Leon O'Hagan, and Emma Jane Coyle), and Prof Frank Moriarty from RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. As pharmacist roles continued to expand, the team are hoping that this evidence might support the development of more pharmacist roles like this in future.