Professor Stephen Byrne has been appointed Chair of Clinical Pharmacy Practice and Head of the School of Pharmacy since 1 October 2013. Stephen has been on the staff in the School since 2004. He commenced his UCC career as a joint appointment between the School and Cork University Hospital where he quickly established a pharmacist and nurse lead anti coagulation clinic with clinicians in CUH. This concept has expanded to other hospitals in the regional along with the establishment of a Community Pharmacy based anti coagulant clinic in East Cork. This novel services have been one of his research interested in recent times.
He graduated from the University of Sunderland in 1996 with degree in Pharmacy, before embarking on his clinical training in Scotland. In 2002 he graduated form the School of Pharmacy, Trinity College Dublin having completed his PhD in the area of non physician management of oral anticoagulant therapy and he was the first person in Ireland to undertake a PhD in the field of Clinical Pharmacy Practice. Since then Stephen worked a both a community and hospital pharmacist in various locations throughout Ireland before joining UCC in 2004.
Among his many research achievements he is part of a UCC team that developed the STOPP/START screening tool that was first published in 2008. This screening tools aims to improve the quality and saengineeringy of medicine prescriptions for elderly patients. The team’s ultimate aim is to develop the STOPP/START software engine so that it can be deployed by all healthcare professionals e.g. doctors, pharmacists and nurses at the point of prescribing, dispensing and/or medication review for elderly patients on a regular basis.
His research team are also working in the field of antimicrobial usage patterns and he was part of a multidisciplinary team to published the first set of antimicrobial guidelines for use in primary care in 2011. He has supervised, 15 PhD students todate, published over 80 peer review papers and has a h index of 23