1. Current Status, Position

Prof. Roisin O'Hare is currently the Northern Ireland (NI) Lead Clinical Education Pharmacist, responsible for experiential learning in hospital pharmacy for NI.  She is based in Craigavon Hospital in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust and works across both Schools of Pharmacy in NI, Queens University Belfast, where she has recently been made a Professor, and Ulster University in Coleraine.  The NI Clinical Education Team teach around 1,000 undergraduate pharmacy students clinical pharmacy skills and the application of therapeutics to real patient scenarios in NI hospitals each year.

2. Education

She studied Pharmacy at the University of Strathclyde and has worked in hospital pharmacy in the field of Cardiology since registering as a pharmacist, now over 25 years ago.  She gained her MSc in clinical pharmacy, she completed her Doctorate of Pharmacy Practice in 2014, with a focus on innovative educational methods to support the teaching and assessment of clinical pharmacy skills.

3. Research Area

She was one of the first independent prescribers on the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland registered and set up a pharmacist-led clinic to manage patients with pulmonary hypertension and later heart failure, winning NI Pharmacist of the Year 2007 for her work.  She joined  the NI Clinical Education Team as Team lead in 2008 and since then she has focussed on developing the clinical pharmacy workforce in NI via undergraduate experiential learning as well supporting the postgraduate education and training across NI.  Through her work with clinical skills Prof O'Hare designed, piloted and evaluated the use of OSCEs in pharmacy in NI gaining her Doctorate for this research in 2014 and publishing her first book on the subject in 2017.  More recently, she has been researching the use of Peer Teaching to support the teaching of undergraduate students during experiential learning as well as other methods of determining student competence with clinical skills, including Entrustable Professional Activities.

4. Conflict of interest

None