Join us on Wednesday, 25 June 2025 at Regent House, Trinity College Dublin for a half-day event exploring how clinical research, medication safety, and patient empowerment can shape a national strategy for ageing better.

Focusing on the challenges of multimorbidity, frailty, and polypharmacy, the programme features contributions from patient advocates, healthcare professionals, researchers, and policymakers. Together, they will share evidence and approaches that place ageing adults at the centre of their care.

This event is funded by the Health Research Board (HRB) through a research grant awarded to RCSI, and is held in collaboration with the Discipline of Medical Gerontology, School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin.

You can view the full agenda and register here.

Speakers

Dr Robert Briggs is a Consultant Geriatrician in St James's Hospital, and combines academic activities in TILDA with a busy clinical workload in Europe's largest Falls & Syncope Unit in Mercer's Institute for Successful Ageing (MISA). He completed a PhD in 2019 examining the role of cerebral perfusion deficits and orthostatic hypotension in mood disorders in later life. He has published over 100 papers in the area of geriatric medicine and falls and was awarded a clinician scientist fellowship by the Health Research Board in 2023 and is the Clinical Lead of the Irish National Falls Audit.

Dr Caitriona Cahir is a Senior Lecturer in the Data Science Centre, School of Population Health, RCSI. Dr Cahir holds a HRB Scholars PhD in Health Services Research, a postgraduate Higher Diploma in Psychology and BA (Mod) in Economics from Trinity College Dublin. Prior to this, Dr Cahir was a Senior Research Fellow, working on a Health Research Board (HRB) Research Leaders Award, investigating quality, safety and adherence to medication in the primary and secondary care settings. She also worked as a Research Officer in the Social Research Division at the Economic and Social Research Institute and was employed as a HRB Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement (ICE) postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Siobhan Casey is the newly appointed Commissioner for Older People for Northern Ireland. Formerly Director of Marketing & Business Development at Age NI, she led major initiatives in dementia, brain health, loneliness, healthy ageing, and support for older workers. She is European Vice-President of the International Federation on Ageing, a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health, and former member of Innovate UK Healthy Ageing Advisory group and Age UK Services for Older People consortium. Siobhan has extensive leadership experience in international marketing, business development, and strategic growth across public, private, and voluntary sectors.

Dr Belinda Hernández is a senior statistician at the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics. Previous to this she was a senior research fellow and lead bio informatician for TILDA (The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing) in Trinity College Dublin (2017- 2024) and Assistant Professor in statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University College Dublin (2015-2017). She holds a PhD in Statistical Machine Learning from University College Dublin as well as an MSc in Applied Statistics from the University of Oxford and a BA (Mod) in Management Science and Information Systems from Trinity College Dublin. She is a multidisciplinary researcher and has published research in areas.

Professor Graham Hughes is a Consultant Physician in Geriatric and General Medicine at St Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin and a Clinical Associate Professor at the School of Medicine, University College Dublin. He also serves as the Clinical Lead for the National Clinical Programme for Older People (NCPOP). Prof. Hughes has a particular interest in Parkinson’s disease and is a strong advocate for patient self-empowerment and holistic models of care. His work emphasises medication safety and quality of life, and he is actively involved in both clinical service delivery and research aimed at improving outcomes for older adults.

Ciara Kirke is Clinical Lead of the National Medication Safety Programme, HSE National Quality & Patient Safety. The work of the programme aims to collaboratively reduce medication-related harm in line with the WHO Medication Without Harm Patient Safety Challenge. She was HSE Lead for the EU-funded iSIMPATHY project 2019-2023 and acts as co-lead and collaborator on multiple research programmes. She led HSE actions to reduce harm with venous thromboembolism (VTE, blood clots) and is now collaborating with the newly established national VTE programme. Ciara is a medication error expert and member of the Naming Review Group for the European Medicines Agency.

Dr Anne Mooney is a patient on polypharmacy and a recent member of Patients for Patient Safety, Ireland. She is interested in medication safety, in general, but most specifically from the patient's perspective. She contributes to enabling patients to understand more about their medication and what can help them to manage their individual situations. She believes it is necessary to be a voice for the patient experience for those willing to listen in the political, research, medical and pharmaceutical sectors in particular. She is also convinced that only when patients are included as active and equal partners in the decision-making around their healthcare and medication management, can optimum outcomes be realised.

Professor Frank Moriarty is a pharmacist and Associate Professor at the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences at RCSI. Professor Moriarty is also institutional lead for open research at RCSI, and visiting research fellow and medications lead at The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). His research interests include prescribing and deprescribing in older adults, pharmacoepidemiology, and pharmaceutical policy. He was recently awarded a Wellcome Career Development Award, which aims to find new approaches to reduce medications and identify medicines that might no longer be needed or could be contributing to adverse effects.

Dr Juliette O’Connell is Assistant Professor in Therapeutics and Pharmacy Practice in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. She is a registered pharmacist with particular research interest in pharmacoepidemiology. Juliette completed her BSc (Pharm) in Trinity College and MPharm in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and qualified as a pharmacist in 2014. She worked in community pharmacy, with a special focus on providing medication services to people with an intellectual disability, prior to commencing her doctoral research in 2016. Her areas of research interest include medication burden and associations with adverse effects, physical function and frailty in older adults with intellectual disability.

Professor Denis O’Mahony been involved in clinical research since 1989. His doctorate was in the area of evoked potential electrophysiology and SPECT imaging in Alzheimer’s disease. He has worked at senior faculty level in the Department of Medicine at UCC since 2005, having previously worked as Senior Lecturer in Geriatric Medicine at the University of Birmingham, UK, from 1995 to 1999. He also works as a Consultant Physician in Geriatric Medicine at Cork University Hospital since 1999. Prof. O’Mahony is the original inventor and principal developer of STOPP (Screening Tool of Older Persons’ Prescriptions) and START (Screening Tool to Alert to Right Treatment) criteria. Prof. O’Mahony and his research group at UCC have also developed STOPPFrail, an explicit criteria tool to guide deprescribing in highly frail older people in their last year of life. Prof. O’Mahony has published over 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Professor Roman Romero-Ortuno is Professor of Ageing Medicine & Frailty (Personal Chair) at Trinity College Dublin and a Consultant Physician at St James’s Hospital, Dublin. He is a leading expert in frailty, dementia, and geriatric medicine, with training in Barcelona, London, Manchester, and Dublin. A faculty member of the Global Brain Health Institute and Co-Chair of the Irish Frailty Network, he also serves on the Executive Board of the European Geriatric Medicine Society (EuGMS) as Director for Education & Training. His contributions to research have earned him prestigious awards, including the President of Ireland Future Research Leaders Award. He leads postgraduate education in ageing and frailty at Trinity, including micro-credentials and a Postgraduate Certificate programme.

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