UCD IRIS Research Projects

The Co-VISION project aims to learn more about how children have creatively found ways to manage the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project is Supported by the Health Research Board as part of a coordinated COVID-19 Rapid Response Research, Development and Innovation programme, to tackle COVID-19 in collaboration with the Irish Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland.  

The aim of this project is to increase the understanding of  home and community-based strategies that contribute to children’s capacity to adjust to societal changes, both during and after pandemics (particularly strategies addressing their sense of safety, calm, hope, self and community efficacy, connectedness). Moreover, the project aims to identify ways in which children’s actions contribute to the capacity of others to adjust to the changes arising from the pandemic. The potential for these activities to influence and contribute to broader social mobilisation will be examined and promoted.

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This project will work closely with healthcare partners and stakeholders to inform the design of a national quality and patient safety (QPS) competency framework. A literature review of existing QPS competencies and competency frameworks relating to patient safety, quality improvement, human factors and how they have been deployed will be conducted. This will be supplemented by interviews with healthcare quality and safety managers, leads, and patient representatives to establish to current landscape of quality and patient safety education and learning nationally. This knowledge will then inform the discussions to design, develop and evaluate the process to support the co-design of the framework.

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This project, a collaboration with the National Quality and Patient Safety Directorate of the Health Service Executive (HSE) is contributing to the development of a National Patient Safety Signals System aimed at integrating existing sources of data to identify and track good practice and remedy any areas of poor practice to ensure the delivery of safe, high-quality care.  This phase of the project involves conducting exploratory work to develop and test the identification and use of composite signals for quality and safety risk or good practice in the National Women and Infants Health Programme (NWIHP).  A review of the methodology adopted internationally to triangulate multiple data sources in deriving composite signals of quality and safety measurement will investigate and report on the existing evidence. In consultation with subject matter experts in NWIHP, the logic flow across the multiple data sources that constitute a composite signal of quality, safety risk or good practice will be identified. The research methodology that will facilitate subject matter experts to agree a set of composite signals will be designed, and appropriate composite signals of safety and quality within NWIHP will be tested and refined.

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What works, for whom does it work (or not), why and in what contexts to support competencies in interprofessional collaboration among interdisciplinary community specialist teams integrated care for older people?

The proposed project builds upon a HRB-funded applied partnership project which involved collaboration between the UCD research team and the National Clinical Programme for Older People (NCPOP). In this project we co-designed the ECLECTIC framework which describes the core competencies for interprofessional collaboration in community specialist teams for older people.

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This project will explore how members of the LGBT community in Ireland, would like their healthcare delivered to them. Gender and Sexual Minority communities face specific health inequalities and disparities when compared to the general population, and this is often confounded by poor experiences in healthcare due to homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Many LGBT people choose not to come out in healthcare environments and knowledge around how to care for gender and sexual minority communities is poor in many areas of healthcare practice. By identifying how members of the community would like healthcare to be provided to them, consideration can be given to specialised service development and delivery, policy and strategy development, as well as education and training of healthcare professionals.

This project has been funded by UCD Seed funding for Equality Diversity and Inclusion Research and is supported by MPOWER at HIV Ireland. LINC and Transgender Equality Network of Ireland.

Dr John P Gilmore is a Fulbright HRB Ireland Health Impact Scholar and in 2023 will be based at the Center for Gender and Sexual Minority Health at University of California San Francisco where he will research enablers and barriers to community-based LGBT healthcare.

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Ophthalmology in Ireland has one of the longest waiting lists with 46,998  people waiting for a first visit outpatient appointment .  In the Mater hospital , this number is 8000 and in the North East region it estimated at 15-17,000.  To successfully navigate our way out of the cycle of waiting lists and delays which were exacerbated by both COVID-19 and the Cyber Attack of 2021, we needed to re-imagine how we deliver eye care in Ireland.  The use of Lean Six Sigma to redesign process has been shown to be effective at a local level in Mater Ophthalmology services and  with Ireland East Hospital Group (IEHG) initiatives but also on a larger level in the UK with the Get It Right First Time (GIRFT) process.  The NERIECs team are using a combination of  Person-centred and Lean Six Sigma approaches to address the process problems and work with teams to co-design solutions. Lean Six Sigma provides the framework for data collection, analysis, planning and scheduling, while engagement within the team and with other colleagues, patients and their families is underpinned by person-centred principles.

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The PADMACS project involves a collaboration with the Royal College of Physician of Ireland (RCPI), St. Vincent’s University Hospital (SVUH), the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital (MMUH), the Alzheimer’s Society of Ireland (ASI) and Family Carers Ireland (FCI). Public and Patient Involvement was central to this project, with the perspectives of key stakeholders and knowledge users integrated with each of the four work packages. This project was funded through the HRB Applied Partnership Award (Grant Number APA-2016-1878).

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Introduction

Women represent 70% of the global health workforce. They are frequent users of health services through ante-natal and obstetric services, childhood development and vaccination programmes, and through primary caregiving roles for elderly or frail parents. Yet women remain underrepresented in key decisions on resource allocation, health service design and delivery, and have limited voice in health service policies and improvements. They are inadequately represented in governance and leadership in healthcare and scientific disciplines across the world.

More than 80% of the nursing staff in Tanzania are female. While specific figures on women in leadership roles within the Tanzanian healthcare sector are not available (something GLASS aims to address), evidence suggests that women are substantially less represented in leadership than their male colleagues. In a context where the health workforce comprises over 70% women, actions must be taken to address this imbalance and support the advancement of women leaders. 

The primary aim of this project is to implement a package of interventions across 3 regions in Tanzania among the health workforce to address the organisational and individual barriers to the advancement of women to leadership positions, and to evaluate the impact on leadership competencies and career advancement actions of the female health workforce.

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Introduction

Collective Leadership and Safety Cultures (Co-Lead) is a research programme that is researching the impact of an emerging model of leadership (collective leadership) on team performance and healthcare safety. We have conducted in-depth research with teams across the health system to identify their challenges in working effectively to deliver safe patient care.  We also synthesised evidence from the literature and from practice on particular strategies or approaches that enable teams to work well together. Utilising all of this evidence, we then co-designed (with healthcare professionals, patients and researchers) a programme of team-based learning sessions that focused on enabling teams to work collectively and create a culture of psychological safety to support the delivery of safe patient care.  We are currently implementing collective leadership interventions with different team types and testing the impact of these interventions on staff performance and patient safety.

The overall aim is to support quality and safety cultures through the development of a new model of leadership that is associated with effective team performance.

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The aim of this project is to develop a thorough understanding of the current model of paediatric unscheduled healthcare provision in Ireland and the impact of recent policy interventions. The insights gained by this research can inform evidence-based health policy for the organisation of paediatric care and resource allocation. It will assess the effectiveness of the current model of healthcare delivery and identify opportunities for improvement or intervention by building on international experiences while appreciating the specific contextual differences in the Irish setting.

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