EAHP is delighted to have secured the participation of Dr. Fiona Reynolds as the second of three keynote speakers at our 18th Congress in Paris 13-15 March 2013.

Dr Reynolds is a Paediatric Intensivist and Deputy Chief Medical Officer at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital. Her published research is in the areas of human factors and team work in emergency situations and in mathematical modeling of health care demand and capacity.

Below, we speak with Dr Reynolds about the themes of her keynote speech, and why these are relevant and of note to the debates and challenges within hospital pharmacy today.

Why were you interested in speaking at the 18th Congress of the EAHP?

My good friend and colleague Professor Anthony Sinclair had told me about this fantastic meeting of Europe's Hospital Pharmacists. As a UK intensivist I know how reliant we are on having our pharmacists at the centre of everything we do so when he invited me to speak at the conference I jumped at the chance to share my thoughts and experiences.

You will be speaking about multidisciplinary teamwork and in particular, the practical challenges to achieving that. What brings you to this subject and why do you feel it is important?

Over the last 10 years patient treatment has become more complex. Mortality rates are going down while more patients with more complex conditions survive. We can only do this with a team approach to care. Each discipline offers its own contribution but only orchestrated teamwork can really make a difference at the margins of what is possible. It's that teamwork making the impossible, possible that I find so compelling.

How do you feel the debate about multidisciplinary care is developing at the current time, and do you consider public spending challenges being experienced across Europe will hinder, or make more urgent, the achievement of collaborative patient care?

I think patient expectation and patient choice will act as a driver to improve access and quality. Patients are far more educated and rightly ask more questions. This means the team has to provide information and choice to patients in a way we never have had to before. Working in the current financial climate means we have to find new innovative ways of working which provides a quality service within a potentially shrinking financial envelope.

Finally, as someone who has attended Congresses such as EAHP’s before, how would you express the value of attending and participating to those hospital pharmacists who perhaps have not yet attended?

The knowledge learned, the ideas shared and professional networking provide us with the impetus to go home to our institutions and shape them for the better. Professional development is intricately linked to organisational development. We become better professionals for attending congresses such as the EAHP and our institutions also benefit both by having better professionals but also by having better teams and better processes.

More information about Dr. Fiona Reynold's keynote speech is available here.

This year's Congress has the overall theme “Improving patient outcomes: a shared responsibility”

Registration information here.

Information on the Scientific Programme here.