Trinity College Dublin and Our Lady's Hospice & Care Service Forge Academic Link
Wednesday 18th May 2016, Dublin. Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) formalising an academic link between the Hospice and TCD today. Speaking at the signing, Professor Linda Hogan, Vice-Provost and Chief Academic Officer of Trinity College Dublin said:
“Trinity College is delighted to officially recognise Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services as an affiliated clinical teaching centre for students of its School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. This collaboration includes undertaking and disseminating of research and clinical audits, and the provision of clinical teaching, including clinical placements and visits. Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services staff associated with the education and training of students will be formally affiliated with the School, will be awarded with the appropriate academic/clinical titles and will be provided access to TCD’s library facilities. We hope that, in the future, there may be opportunities to consider joint funding for the provision of staff between the two institutions.”
Chief Executive of Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services, Ms Audrey Houlihan said, “We are delighted to be a recognised education partner of Trinity College. This formalises a relationship that has existed for over a decade with the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
We believe this formal commitment to teaching, research and clinical links provides a wonderful opportunity for our staff and Trinity students and promotes excellence in patient care. We hope that future multidisciplinary education programmes at OLH&CS will also benefit from this affiliation.
It will encourage greater opportunity for research projects across the organisations and will provide additional opportunities for the education of pharmacists in the care specialties offered at OLH&CS and for the professional development of pharmacy staff.
This agreement also facilitates academic support for OLH&CS’ education programmes. Our Palliative Meds Info service, providing drug therapy advice to health professionals nationwide has, particularly, benefitted from TCD’s academic support in developing education programmes.”
This MOU complements agreements the School has in place with St James’s and Tallaght Hospitals.
Eimear O’Dwyer, Chief Pharmacist at Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services said, “In return for our clinical support, this link with TCD will support our staff to participate in regular audits, research and Continuing Professional Development (CPD). We will also be in a position to engage in wider reaching internal and external research in the disciplines of Palliative Medicine, Rheumatology and Gerontology. As well as playing a role as an educator, our pharmacy department has a longstanding record of being progressive and innovative with its history of a fruitful affiliation with St James’ Hospital for many years. This has led to our current stand-alone service with a strong patient-centred focus. Our ‘Palliative Meds Info’ service is now a well-established and widely used resource for health professionals on all aspects of drug therapy that are used in palliative care. For the future, we are interested in further developing our clinical services across the organisation. We are constantly exploring opportunities to develop practices in line with the evidence base, including improved systems facilitating self-administration by patients.”
Explaining the meaning of this relationship for TCD, Professor Anne Marie Healy, Head of School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, said, “Palliative care impacts upon us all and it is growing in importance. Palliative care will continue to evolve as a discipline and as a service and the School is excited to be entering this partnership with Our Lady’s and is concerned to ensure that all of our students, undergraduate and postgraduate, have the opportunity to learn with and from the best and that we, as a School, can contribute in some way to improving patients’ quality of life through palliative care.”
Representatives from the Pharmacy Department and Management of Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services along with representatives from the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, together with the Vice-Provost, the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Chief Executive of Our Lady’s Hospice & Care Services.