Dr Kieran Dalton is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy, and has worked as a lecturer in UCC's School of Pharmacy since January 2019.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Pharmacy (BPharm) degree from University College Cork in 2013 and completed a Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 2014 whilst working in Sligo University Hospital, achieving First-Class Honours in both. After completing the MPharm, Kieran worked as a hospital pharmacist in Sligo until May 2016, at which point he commenced his doctoral research in the School of Pharmacy, UCC.

His PhD investigated the factors affecting the optimisation of medication appropriateness in hospitalised older adults. During his PhD, Kieran worked as a primary researcher on the SENATOR project, which received €5.938 million in funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013). As part of this project, Kieran collaborated with clinical colleagues in Belgium, Iceland, Italy, Scotland, and Spain on a cluster randomised controlled trial of a software intervention aimed at minimising adverse drug reactions in acutely ill hospitalised older patients. Since his PhD, Kieran has continued to conduct research and publish the findings in the area of medication optimisation in older adults. In 2023, he was awarded a place on the US Deprescribing Research Network’s (USDeN) Junior Investigator Intensive program.

Kieran is also actively involved in several other research areas of patient-focused research, with collaborators locally, nationally, and internationally. One of these areas includes advancing pharmacists' roles, and Kieran is committed to conducting research to inform the expansion of pharmacist roles. In 2024, Kieran was appointed to the Research Sub-Committee of national Expert Taskforce for Pharmacy (created by the Minister for Health), where he helped guide the research agenda regarding these expanding pharmacist roles.

Medication optimisation 

One of Kieran's primary research interests is in medication optimation, especially addressing 'potentially inappropriate prescribing' and 'deprescribing' (which includes stopping or reducing the dose of medications); this is aligned with his commitment to sustainability and reducing unnecessary harm and waste. Whilst his research in this area has primarily focused on older adults (i.e. aged 65 years and over), he has conducted research on this topic across a variety of settings - primary care, secondary care, intermediate care, and specialist palliative care.

As part of his research, he has a particular interest in understanding the behaviours that influence medication optimisation, as this can help develop future interventions based on targeting behaviours. He is also interested in how software can be used as an aid to medication optimisation, and has published research on the use of computerised interventions designed to improve prescribing and hospitalised older patient outcomes. 

Prescribing cascades

Kieran could be considered one of the world-leading researchers on the topic of 'prescribing cascades'. A prescribing cascade is where a medication is prescribed the manage the adverse effect of another medication. He has comprehensively mapped out how this term has been defined in the literature and posited new ways of conceptualising this phenomenon. He has also been involved in multidiscplinary international collaborations (e.g. iKASCADE) that have developed tools (i.e. ThinkCascades and the PIPC List) that raise awareness about prescribing cascades for clinicians, and help evaluate their prevalence in patients.

Expanding and advancing pharmacist roles

Kieran is interested in conduct research that evaluates and helps inform the expanding role of pharmacists. He has undertaken several research studies exploring the potential and actual roles of pharmacists in general practice settings; this has included an evaluation of the iSIMPATHY project in Ireland, involving pharmacists conducting person-centred medication reviews with patients at the highest risk of medication-related harm. Kieran is also interested in pharmacist prescribing, pharmacists delivering advanced practice roles, and the recognition process for this advancement.

Pharmacy education

Kieran places high value into conducting research regarding his teaching - helping to identify novel ways to enhance student learning. He is particularly interested in optimising the use of objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) in the School. To date, he has published a study regarding an online video-recorded OSCE that he implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was beneficial to students. As a member of his School's Pharmacy Education Research Group, Kieran continues to collaborate with colleagues on developing new formative OSCE initiatives - one recently with students designing the OSCE assessment checklist and students having the opportunity to play all the roles (i.e. pharmacist, patient, assessor, and as an observer without a checklist). 

Kieran teaches across a range of healthcare disciplines, and continually promotes the importance of the pharmacy profession. He thoroughly enjoys his role as an educator, and finds it very rewarding to observe students' development in their knowledge and skills over the years in UCC. When teaching pharmacy students, he aims to equip them with key graduate skills and attributes in order to prepare them for ever-evolving pharmacist roles.

He is involved in the facilitation of group-based interdisciplinary learning sessions between pharmacy students and medical students in Cork's Mercy University Hospital with real patient cases as a joint venture with the School of Medicine, UCC to help overcome interprofessional barriers and encourage collaborative lifelong learning.

At an undergraduate level for pharmacy students, he is a strong advocate for the provision of timely face-to-face feedback to enhance students' knowledge, skills, and attributes to ensure they become competent pharmacists in line with the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland (PSI) Core Competency Framework. In particular, he routinely uses 'simulated patients' to increase patient-centred learning, followed by feedback to show exemplary pharmacist behaviours. Alongside this, he also values the importance in receiving feedback from students in order to continually improve his teaching and assessment.

Kieran is a keen supporter of undergraduate student research. He has acted as the supervisor or preceptor to several students undertaking research placements over the summer or during 4th year pharmacy students' 16-week experiential learning placement. From this and in supervising MPharm research projects, Kieran has published a plethora of full texts and conference abstracts with undergraduate student authors.