Season’s Greetings from MOIC
The team at MOIC would like to wish everyone a Happy Holiday season.
2021 has been a challenging and busy year. Take a look at what we have been up to in our 2021 Newsletter.
Pallative Care Pharmacy paper published
Palliative care pharmacists at Northern Trust rapidly developed a new service during the first COVID-19 surge to ensure more palliative and end-of-life patients would have access to specialist pharmacy input when they needed it.
By training additional staff, there was an opportunity to increase service provision, utilising palliative care pharmacy skills to undertake activities such as the symptom management of patients, appropriate management of medicines, improved access to medicines, advice for other healthcare professionals, and supporting discharge from the hospital.
Funding approved to research Diabetes and Heart Failure Technology
MOIC are delighted that their pre-project application to the Northern Ireland Connected Health Innovation Centre (CHIC) to explore the use of the AstraZeneca Apollo dashboard for identification of patients and other digital tools to self-monitor and improve patient management with Heart Failure and Type 2 Diabetes has been successful. This connected health research project involves collaboration with industrial (AstraZeneca, Healthcare Analytics), healthcare (MOIC, SHSCT) and academic (CHIC in UU) partners.
This will directly help patients in Northern Ireland suffering from Type 2 Diabetes and Heart Failure. It is well known that Type 2 Diabetes is associated with increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. In Northern Ireland (NI), there are approx. 80,000 people living with Type 2 Diabetes (T2DM) and 15,000 people living with Heart Failure (HF).
Currently, GP practices have access to a Diabetes Care Dashboard (Apollo), developed by Astra Zeneca. The Dashboard is an informatics-based diagnostic solution that enables GP practices to extract, analyse and review primary care held data to assist with patient care.
This funding will now enable us to explore how information provided from Apollo could be used to identify patients with both diabetes and heart failure who could be eligible to use digital tools to self-monitor and improve the management of their condition. In the SHSCT there are around 1300 “active” patients in the system. Systems to effectively identify, prioritise and guide management patients within an acceptable timescale are required. Without this, patients may inevitably wait and potentially miss the window of opportunity for clinical benefit.
We will be working directly with the SHSCT cardiology team and hope to identify which healthcare technologies would be the most useful for these patients to use at home and to explore the facilitators and barriers to the use of healthcare technologies.
SHAPES present at the 1st North American Conference on Integrated Care 21
We were delighted to collaborate with Edgeneering (EDGE) recently to present an electronic poster at the 1st North American Conference on Integrated Care 2021, which was held online between 4 – 7 October.
The conference theme was ‘Co-designing for health and wellbeing with individuals and communities’, and brought together leaders, researchers, clinicians, managers, citizens, patients and caregivers from around the world who are engaged in the design and delivery of integrated health and social care.
The poster described activities that had been undertaken in Pilot Theme 3 as part of Phase 2 of the SHAPES Pan-European Pilot Campaign, wherein target users provided feedback on the design of a patient-facing app for optimising their use of medicines. The app is a targeted combination of the eCare app (EDGE) and the eHealthpass app (GNOMON). Participants in the study were presented with design mock-ups and feedback on the app’s visual appearance was sought via interview. By involving users from an early stage, it was possible to identify specific adaptations deemed relevant to improve the app’s usability and the users’ acceptance for new technologies.
MOIC paper published – Consultant Respiratory Pharmacist Role
MOIC are proud to be working with consultant respiratory pharmacist Carine Gormely to improve medicines optimisation in people with respiratory conditions across Northern Ireland.
This week our paper was published that outlines some of the clinical and economic factors associated with the decisions to invest in the consultant pharmacist model of care in Northern Ireland.
Medicines optimisation for those with respiratory conditions can have a significant impact on clinical outcomes and substantial efficiency gains for health care. Consultant pharmacists are experts working at the top of their specialism in four main pillars of practice, namely clinical care, leadership, education and training, and research and development. A consultant respiratory pharmacist has recently been appointed at a large Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland to provide expert care and clinical leadership for the medicines optimisation agenda with regards to respiratory care in Northern Ireland.
To read the full article follow the link below.
Publication Success for MOIC PHD project
One of MOIC’s key drivers is to share knowledge throughout Europe and beyond on delivering safe and effective medicines. We did this through our successful knowledge translation hosting programme. Under this programme, visitors are usually welcomed to Northern Ireland unfortunately during 2020/21 these visits were unable to progress, however this did not prevent us from building collaborative links.
Staff from MOIC, Northern Trust Pharmacy and Microbiology have been working with Sonja Guntschnig from Austria. Sonja first visited NHSCT under the hosting programme in 2019. She is now developing antimicrobial stewardship programmes within her hospital which could potentially be scaled within her region. Linked to this, she will be undertaking a PhD under the supervision and mentorship of Ulster University and MOIC.
This week one of Sonja’s pilot projects was published in the Hospital Pharmacy Europe journal. The article looks at the implementation of new clinical pharmacy services in the Tauernklinikum in Zell am See hospital, Austria.
Speaking about the publication Sonja said “Many thanks to Prof. Michael Scott, Dr. Aaron Courtenay and Prof. Kathy Burnett for the help. I am very lucky to be working with MOIC – Medicines Optimisation Innovation Centre and Ulster University.”
To read the full article https://viewer.joomag.com/hpe-99-october-2021-issue/0242904001634123289