UCD researchers among recipients to be funded through HRB’s €20m Applied Programme Awards
Posted 18 December 2023
Two medical researchers at University College Dublin been announced as recipients of the Health Research Board’s (HRB) Applied Programme Awards (APRO), which aim to support evidence-informed decision making in health and social care.
(opens in a new window)Professor Alistair Nichol and (opens in a new window)Associate Professor Brian O'Donoghue, from the UCD School of Medicine, are among the eight recipients named for 2023’s funding round.
The APROs are designed to support high-quality, team-based applied research designed to lead to a step change in practice and policy when it comes to delivering outcomes for the health system, population health, or for service users and carers.
The 2023 APRO recipients are:
- Professor Alistair Nichol, University College Dublin - 'PRIME-Ireland Pandemic Resilience Ireland Clinical PlatforM: Refining, Performing, Predicting and Applying a globally integrated clinical research response for future pandEmics in Ireland'. Award value: €2,499,982
- Associate Professor Brian O'Donoghue, University College Dublin - 'Achieving Recovery in Psychotic Disorders with Comprehensive Clinical Guidelines'. Award value: €2,499,412
- Professor David Cotter, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences - 'VISTA: VISion To Action for promoting mental health and recovery. An Implementation Science approach to "Sharing the Vision" - Ireland's national mental health policy'. Award value: €2,499,605
- Dr Michelle Flood, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences - 'Sjögren’s beyond dry eye: Advancing policy and practice through co-creation of integrated care journeys and education for health professionals – The SYNERG-IE Programme'. Award value: €2,558,926
- Professor Iracema Leroi, Trinity College Dublin - 'EMERALD-Lewy: Improving the diagnosis, management, and lived experience of overlooked dementias in Ireland'. Award value: €2,499,965
- Professor Deirdre Bennett, University College Cork - 'Educating Healthcare Professionals for Climate Change Resilient and Sustainable Healthcare Systems'. Award value: €2,475,908
- Dr Pauline Frizelle, University College Cork - 'Maximising the benefits of intervention research to support language and communication in children'. Award value: €2,493,765
- Professor Patricia Leahy-Warren, University College Cork - 'Maximise support for breastfeeding for sustainable population health and wellbeing: Integrated knowledge translation approach, MaxSBF'. Award value: €2,445,580
The awards were specifically designed to ensure that knowledge generated from research can be quickly put into policy and/or practice.
“All of the successful awardees involved knowledge users in their core team at all stages… [and] also have very strong Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) components,” said Dr Anne Cody, HRB Head of Investigator-Led Grants, Research Careers and Enablers.
“Both of these elements should help to quickly translate knowledge generated into the healthcare system.”
Dr Mairéad O’Driscoll, Chief Executive at the HRB, added that each chosen project was “carefully aligned with the aims of not only the HRB Strategy, but also wider Department of Health and EU research priorities”.
“We were delighted to receive additional support from the Department of Health to increase the number of projects we could fund and many of the successful awards address evidence gaps identified in the Department’s Statement of Research Priorities.
“It was also particularly pleasing to see that many of the awards built on previous HRB-funded work, which indicates a coherence among our combined efforts to maximise the impact of Ireland’s health research investments.”
The winning UCD projects:
PRIME Ireland Pandemic Resilience Ireland Clinical PlatforM: Refining, Performing, Predicting and Applying a globally integrated clinical research response for future pandemics in Ireland
- Professor Alistair Nichol - Award value: €2,499,982
The PRIME-Ireland pandemic resilience programme, led by the Irish Critical Care-Clinical Trials Network, is a national and global clinical research programme to prepare Ireland to react more effectively during the next pandemic. The programme delves into lessons learned from COVID-19 and aims to improve clinical trial designs.
PRIME-Ireland increases the public and patient voice in research and delivers clinical studies to learn about infectious diseases occurring in Ireland. Importantly, the programme also benchmarks care, and assesses how patients respond to an infection and their treatments.
This is to help achieve tailored patient care and improved patient outcomes while ensuring Ireland has research-ready capacity to effectively respond to the next pandemic.
Professor Alistair Nichol, Professor of Critical Care Medicine at UCD School of Medicine, Consultant at St Vincent’s University Hospital, and Director of the Irish Critical Care-Clinical Trials Network said:
“The PRIME-Ireland programme allows us a unique opportunity to ensure we build on our clinical research response to pandemics to understand what worked well during COVID-19 and what didn’t, to provide answers to important clinical questions and improve the care of our sickest patients in Ireland and worldwide”.
This programme will ensure Ireland is at the forefront of the research response to infectious diseases and ready for any future pandemic threat, reducing the detrimental impact on patients, healthcare and society.
Achieving Recovery in Psychotic Disorders with Comprehensive Clinical Guidelines
- Associate Professor Brian O’Donohue - Award value: €2,499,412
Unfortunately, the majority of people diagnosed with a psychotic disorder do not achieve a full recovery, as a large proportion experience ongoing symptoms or do not return to education or employment. Dr O’Donohue’s research programme has identified six key areas in which the treatment and outcomes of psychotic disorders could be improved with further knowledge and research.
The research team brings together experts from different perspectives of psychosis, including clinicians, researchers, individuals with lived experience and caregivers. The team will also draw upon international expertise, with collaborators from internationally renowned centres in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, and Australia.
The programme will focus on improving autonomy and supported decision-making in relation to medication, preventing the physical health complications common in people with psychotic disorders and identifying those who do not respond to standard treatments.
It will also focus on tailored prescribing for females and the adjunctive use of nutritional supplements to improve cognition and negative symptoms of psychosis. Finally, a digital clinical tool will be developed that will support clinicians and service users in deciding whether to discontinue medication after achieving recovery.
The findings from each of these research areas will culminate into holistic, comprehensive Irish clinical guidelines for the treatment of psychosis. This will facilitate individualised pharmacological treatments for people affected by psychosis, with the result of improving symptomatic, physical health and functional outcomes.
Mr Michael Norton, Recovery and Engagement Project Lead with the HSE and lead PPI representative within the project, said that the programme was “a catalyst for change within current mental health discourse as services will become empowered to tailor service delivery towards the concerns of those impacted by psychosis’.
Lead Applicant Associate Professor Brian O’Donoghue described this programme further as ‘a step closer to precision medicine in psychiatry, and it will lead to the development of Irish clinical guidelines for the treatment of psychosis.’’
By: David Kearns, Digital Journalist / Media Officer, UCD University Relations (with materials from Emma Loughney, UCD Research and Innovation)
To contact the UCD News & Content Team, email: newsdesk@ucd.ie
