Professor Alistair Nichol and Associate Professor Brian O'Donoghue, UCD School of Medicine, have been announced as recipients of the Health Research Board (HRB) Applied Programme Awards (APROs).
The APROs 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. There were eight awardees in total this year.
Dr Mairéad O’Driscoll, Chief Executive at the HRB, said “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 APRO awards were specifically designed to ensure that knowledge generated from 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 healthcare system.”
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.
Lead Applicant: Prof 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.
Lead Applicant: Associate Prof Brian O’Donoghue
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’Donoghue’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.’’
For more information on the programme or awardees visit the HRB website.