The Health Research Board (HRB) has appointed four new Research Leaders in the areas of suicide prevention, safe prescribing, dementia care and team leadership in the health services.

These awards, worth a total of €5.7 million, are designed to build capacity in areas of strategic importance for health delivery in Ireland. They will ensure senior people have dedicated time to generate relevant evidence to inform decision-making in these key areas. One of these leaders is Professor Kathleen Bennett, Associate Professor in Biostatistics at the RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland) Division of Population Health Sciences. 

Professor Bennett will now lead a research team to undertake a programme of research titled ‘Statistical epidemiology in Population Health and Health Services Research: Quality and Patient Safety in Medicines’. The programme will aim to provide detailed information and evidence about adverse drug events (ADE) in primary care and hospital settings with a view to devising an evidence-informed approach to reduce ADEs in the Irish healthcare setting, costs associated with ADEs and information on medication taking behaviour. The award is worth €1.4m over the course of five years.

Speaking on her HRB Research Leader award, Professor Bennett commented, "The Irish population is getting older and this is leading to an increase in the use of medications. The number of people on five or more regular medicines is increasing year on year and it is known that increases in the number of medicines leads to problems of drug interactions, adherence to medicines, increased drug costs and adverse drug events. ADEs are defined as harm caused by a drug or the inappropriate use of a drug and account for approximately 15-20% of all healthcare related adverse events. With this research programme we hope to determine the association between medication-taking behaviour, changes to medicines and outcomes including ADEs, quality of life, healthcare utilisation and disease progression as well as estimating the national burden, costs and outcomes of ADEs and poor adherence to medicines."

Speaking on the awards, Graham Love, Chief Executive of the HRB said, "These awards are designed to address knowledge gaps in our health service. If you want to turn good services into brilliant ones, then research will give you that edge."

The HRB Research Leader Awards were designed to support high quality, applied research that is relevant to healthcare system managers, healthcare providers and/or policy makers; to facilitate strong research leadership in Population Health and Health Services Research (PHHSR) that meets strategic needs at local and national level. They also aim to support universities in developing and strengthening education programmes in applied health and policy research.