The HRB has announced €20 million to support evidence-informed decision making in health and social care. Congratulations to Associate Professor Brian O'Donoghue, whose project, Achieving Recovery in Psychotic Disorders with Comprehensive Clinical Guidelines was awarded close to €2.5M in funding.
Associate Professor Brian O’Donoghue described this programme 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".
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.
The funding will support eight programme awards* to tackle challenges in dementia, breastfeeding supports, speech and language interventions for children, autoimmune disease, pandemic preparedness and climate-resilient healthcare systems. They also include two projects on mental health designed specifically to support Sharing the Vision, our national mental health strategy.
The Applied Programme Awards are designed to support high-quality, team-based applied research which will lead to a step change in practice and policy to deliver outcomes for the health system, population health, or for service users and carers.
According to Dr Mairéad O’Driscoll, Chief Executive at the HRB, “The successful projects in this scheme are 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 awards were specifically designed to ensure that knowledge generated from the research can be quickly put into policy and/or practice.
According to Dr Anne Cody, Head of Investigator-Led Grants, Research Careers and Enablers, “All of the successful awardees involved knowledge users in their core team at all stages of the research process, which we know leads to improved research outcomes that are more likely to be applied in practice and deliver the greatest benefit. They also have very strong Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) components. Both of these elements should help to quickly translate knowledge generated into the health care system.”
The successful applicants were:
Notes
*Programme awards provide support for the long-term development of a health research field by established investigators with an outstanding track record of achievement. The HRB Applied Programme Awards scheme invited proposals in pre-selected thematic areas which reflect broad health and social care challenges nationally and internationally and include areas that cause significant burden or emerging areas where there is a need for increased capacity and additional long-term commitment of funds. While not the only input, particular attention was paid to the Statement of Research Priorities published by the Department of Health.