News
School of Pharmacy Representatives at the SPHeRE 2024 Conference
Staff and students of the School of Pharmacy were actively participating at the SPHeRE (Structured population health, policy and health services research education) conference in RCSI on 29th February.
Dr Edel Burton, SPHeRe Scholar and Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy presented the following:
Stroke/Transient Ischaemic attack (TIA) survivors and caregivers' perspectives of acute stroke care during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland: a qualitative descriptive study. (Oral presentation)
Angiotensin receptor blocker and angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors prescription frequencies following pharmacovigilance concerns during COVID-19 in Ireland and the United Kingdom. (Poster presentation)
Edel Burton, Eilis O'Reilly, Meadhbh Cosgrove, Mark Coughlan, Lorna English, Prajakta Meshram, Margaret Bermingham.
Dr Aoife Fleming presented on a research study collaboration with Dr Margaret Bermingham and MPharm students Hannah O'Flaherty and Maeve Smith:
A cross-sectional survey of pharmacists' views on the provision of regular hormonal contraception in community pharmacy practice in Ireland. (Oral presentation).
Fourth year UCC pharmacy student Órla O’Donohue presented a research poster on work undertaken while on placement with Pfizer Healthcare alongside co-authors Abaigeal Jackson, Duilia Bruno, and Maura Kinahan. The title of this poster was : “Real World Evidence Use in Medicines Regulation: What does the future hold for Ireland?”.
A review of the draft Irish Health Information Bill, the European Health Dataspace legislation, and publications on US and EU real world evidence use was undertaken by Orla and her co-authors. It was noted that Ireland has much work to do to implement the Bill to bring the jurisdiction in line with the standards the EU have set for the collection and accessibility of health data in its Member States. Both the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) continue to examine the use and standardisation of Real World Evidence (RWE) use in regulatory decision-making. The EMA have identified areas for improvement before RWE can be used in their decision-making, while the FDA continues to use RWE in the contexts of label expansion and post-approval safety studies as they investigate methods of standardisation for data collection and generation.
This area of RWE use is set to evolve rapidly within the next decade, and it will be interesting to see the clinical, academic, and regulatory impact of the upcoming changes.
More information on the SPHeRE conference here