Broadly speaking my research is about a pharmacy education and interprofessional
collaboration. I test strategies that enable students to derive to better
clinical decisions through reflective practices I certainly hope that this
type of research enables students to be better practitioners making better
decisions for better clinical outcomes for the patients. I use a number of
different strategies so the RACA, the Reflective Ability Clinical Assessment
but I also use the RIPE model which is the Reflective Interprofessional
Education Model, and we use the medium and high fidelity mannequins and on
simulation in standardized patients. We've been putting this research into
practice, we've published around this model of learning, and recently we actually
received a University Award for this model of learning too. My research is
focused on the integration of pharmacists in general practice which
means when you're going to see your doctor there's not only a nurse or a
physio that you can see within the practice but also a pharmacist.
Pharmacists are really enjoying working within the general practice. It gives
them a chance to use their skills and really show other healthcare
professionals what they can do. The GPs have also loved having someone
there to support them in helping patients understand their medications. I
really hope that our research shows that having a pharmacist involved in our
general practice team stops patients are going to hospital because of
drug-related problems, helps them get the most out of their medicines, and really
helps them control their disease states. My research is on chronic airway
inflammations as presented in asthma chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
and cystic fibrosis. There is currently no cure for these diseases and current
anti-inflammatory formulations are insufficient.We are currently working on
a pre-clinical validation of a novel anti-inflammatory platform that we've
developed.We can load it with different therapeutics and these therapeutics are
going to induce cells own recycling mechanism to target inflammation. This is
a paradigm shift. No other therapeutic on a market has taken this approach to
resolved inflammation. In patients with lung diseases like asthma and cystic
fibrosis, when the patient gets to a stage that they become refractive and
they do not respond to current corticosteroid therapies,
then this new treatment would be another option that helps their body's own
mechanism, recycling mechanism, to fight the inflammation and clear the
inflammation. My research is looking at the safety and the quality of the way
medicines are used in hospitals and nursing homes. I get medicine supply data
from a pharmacy or an industry partner that has worked with nursing homes, and
by looking at what's happening in the real world, were able to identify
problems, start to think about solutions, and change the way that medicines
are used in facilities and in hospitals. I'm passionate about my research because
I'm a pharmacist and I started my life in the hospital setting where my
specialty area was medicines used in older people. So it made sense for me when
I moved across to research, to bring that clinical knowledge and that background
with me, that I've been working one-on-one with older people and their
medicines, and so it was just a natural progression to look at how we can
improve things at that population level. My research is interested in
microvesicles. Microvesicles are small bubbles that are released from the
surface of all cell types. In cancer these microvesicles or bubbles pass
messages that increase drug resistance, increase metastatic capacity.So
basically these microvesicles are causing the progression of cancer.
Multi-drug resistance is a huge problem in cancer.We get clinical relapse of
patients when they're treated with the chemotherapeutic agent, and we believe
this is because of microvesicle signals, so in the end we hope to come up with
novel therapeutics that target these vesicles to stop the progression, stop
multi-drug resistance, and improve patient outcomes.