Dr. Kevin Murphy graduated from University College Cork with an honours degree in Pharmacy in 2007. After gaining several years of clinical experience in community pharmacies across Munster, he undertook his doctoral research in the School of Pharmacy in UCC in the area of benzodiazepine use. He gained experience in both quantitative (both proforma databases and national databases) and qualitative (focus groups and semi-structured interviews) research methodologies. After the completion of his PhD in 2014, he worked as a Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy under a temporary contract at the School of Pharmacy in UCC. He then took up a position as Project Manager in the randomised, controlled, multi-centre Optimising Therapy to prevent avoidable hospital admissions in the multimorbid elderly (OPERAM) trial in 2016. The trial received €6.6 million in funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research programme and the Swiss Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation. The trial is investigating the benefit of whether pharmacotherapy optimisation, including use of an electronic recommendation system, leads to reduced drug related hospital admissions. He resumed work as a Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy in 2017. He is involved in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in the BPharm/MPharm and the MSc (Clinical Pharmacy) degree. He also contributes to the Certificate in Nurse Prescribing.

Training:2019: ICH Good Clinical Practice Refresher 2017: Good Clinical Practice in Medical Device Research2017: Introduction to project Management, Fistral Training and Consultancy 2016: ICH Good Clinical Practice2015: Cochrane Systematic Review course, Cochrane Ireland

My interest in teaching is to produce pharmacy graduates who will be medicines’ experts and will have patient welfare as their primary focus. This encompasses many aspects. One aspect is my own ability to guide students. I strive to improve my teaching knowledge and abilities on a continual basis. I seek opportunities to evaluate my current teaching practices and to implement improvements. Another aspect is to demonstrate the behaviours and attitudes of a competent pharmacist. These can be described in textbooks but changing students’ behaviours and attitudes requires more than book learning. Students must be exposed to real-life examples of exemplary pharmacist behaviours and attitudes to effect changes in students. The final aspect is to provide students with a learning experience that is conducive to complete understanding of the topic being studied. Students need an in-depth understanding of clinical pharmacy to practice successfully as pharmacists because they will encounter a vast number of patients, medicines and medical conditions, and inadequate understanding could lead to the suboptimal patient care. Training2019: International Advanced Assessment course, London2019: Preregistration Exam observation training, Dublin2019: safeTALK, HSE2018: Making Every Contact Count training 2018: First Aid Response training 2018: LEAD - Living Equality & Diversity, UCC 2018: General Data Protection Regulations, UCC 2017: PGDip Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, UCC 2016: PG Cert Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, UCC