The 2026 Annual Clinical Conference of the Hospital Pharmacists Association of Ireland (HPAI), held in the Crowne Plaza Hotel In Santry, Dublin, featured a number of distinguished national and international speakers who delivered thought-provoking and informative presentations from Friday 24th to Sunday 26th of April.
As well as expert presenters, the conference featured special interest group meetings, the Association’s AGM, a number of workshop sessions, and a wide range of top-quality clinical poster presentations for attendees to browse. As usual, the event also provides vital networking opportunities and a chance to reconnect with colleagues and friends, as well as access to high-quality CPD.
Held under the theme ‘Building the Pharmacists of the Future’, the conference heard from a range of excellent speakers. These experts in their respective fields spoke about topics relevant to the profession, and inspiring Workshop Sessions that covered areas such as Pharmaceutical Care of Hepatology Patients, Evidence-Based Management of Anticoagulant Therapy, The Clinical Pharmacist in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Paediatric Palliative Care, How to Use Action Research to Develop Pharmacy Services, and Presentation Skills.
Opening the Conference, HPAI President Mr Richard Sykes — in his final year as President of the Association — expressed his pride at how the conference has gone from strength-to-strength over the years. “It is fantastic to see such a full conference once again, and it is great to see so many first-time attendees,” said Mr Sykes. “It is a great way to find friends, talk about the challenges we all face, and also to have some fun… the knowledge we need is here in this room, so please make use of it.”
Mr Sykes also spoke about the “constant change” the profession has witnessed in recent years. “But constant change brings with it opportunities, and like it or not, the changes will keep coming. We need to be ready for those changes and we need to make the best of it.
“We have had huge change in our profession — we have had recognition of new grades, we are beginning to see new systems come on-stream, and new ways of working.
“The entire HSE is changing in its configuration, and a lot of things are up in the air,” Mr Sykes continued. “The ‘constants’ are that we need to keep providing services for our patients and keep providing good-quality pharmaceutical care, which is why we are all here this weekend — to do the best we can for our patients, to exchange ideas, and sharpen our expertise. We represent the entire range of hospital pharmacy.”
Mr Sykes also commented on how the Conference has once again risen to new heights. “We have had a record year for posters, in fact we have needed to open a second poster room,” he told the attendees. “That is incredible, and for a relatively small profession, the amount of innovation and good practice that you bring is really phenomenal, year after year… I would ask you to take what you learn here, take it back to your base, and keep advocating for the profession.”
In his President’s Message, Mr Sykes also thanked the Conference’s sponsors and industry colleagues for their continued support, without which the Conference would not be such as success, and he invited all attendees to visit and interact with industry partners at the event.
Building the pharmacists of the future
This year’s Keynote Speaker at the HPAI Annual Clinical Conference 2026 was Prof Roisin O’Hare, Northern Ireland Lead Clinical Education Pharmacist, who delivered a talk titled ‘How to ‘Build’ the Future Pharmacist’. Prof O’Hare has a number of distinctions, and is Director of Professional Development and a member of the Scientific Committee at the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists, among a number of other pivotal roles.
Prof O’Hare invited the attendees to consider what makes a ‘good pharmacist’, and what criteria they would apply to that description. “Think about what that ‘secret ingredient’ might be to make a great future pharmacist,” she said.
Prof O’Hare discussed the shift towards more preventative approaches in healthcare, and what she described as the “mismatch” between current education for pharmacists, which is often too “knowledge-heavy” and risk-aware and task-focused, and the need for pharmacists who are trained to be decision-makers and innovators. “Do we need decision-makers and risk-owners and system-improvers, and are we over-producing competent pharmacists, and under-producing impactful ones?” Prof O’Hare posited.
She also discussed what “parts” are important to build the future pharmacist, which on top of clinical knowledge include consultation and negotiation skills, digital competence, research and evaluation skills, and leadership qualities, among others.
“In the UK, we rewrote our initial education and training standards and they were released in 2021,” Prof O’Hare told the Conference. “The main goal for that is that by the end of July 2026, we have to make sure that every new pharmacist entering the register enters not only as a pharmacist, but also as a prescriber.”
Prof O’Hare explained that the concept of “early responsibility” is emphasised in the Pharmacy degree, which includes embedded pre-prescribing skills from day one of the first year; enhanced consultation and physical assessment skills; reflective and critical thinking; inter-professional training and working; extended experiential learning, and more. “One of the most important things to think about is what support you need,” she told the Conference. “One of the vital things you need to do is to invest in supervisors. Think about what you need to support undergraduate and postgraduate people.”
Prof O’Hare spoke about the importance of establishing clear standards for clinical pharmacy, and focusing on what students are doing to improve patient care, as this will transform how students feel about themselves and how they feel as part of the team. “If you are able to contribute to your patient’s outcome, it gives you such a buzz as a learner, and for all of us as practitioners,” she said.
“You are the future of Pharmacy,” Prof O’Hare told the attendees. “You are also the future educators of the next generation, and you are the ones who are going to make it happen.”
e-Medication Reconciliation: The way forward in patient care
The Keynote Speech at the HPAI Annual Clinical Conference 2026 was followed by four Oral Presentations delivered by expert pharmacists on topics in their special areas of interest. These included ‘e-Medication Reconciliation at Cork University Hospital (CUH)’ by Ms Emily Byrne, CUH; ‘A Qualitative Study of Paediatric Delirium Diagnosis and the Lived Experience of Parents’ by Mr Diarmaid Semple of Children’s Health Ireland, Crumlin; ‘Unplanned Hospitalisation Due To Adverse Drug Events in Frail Older Adults with Cancer’ by Mr Darren Walsh of University Hospital Waterford; and ‘A Scoping Review of Advanced or Specialist Pharmacist Roles in Hospital Outpatient Settings’ by Ms Emer McManus or St Vincent’s University Hospital.
Ms Byrne outlined the benefits of e-Medication Reconciliation (e-MR), including prompt drug history recording prior to the initiation of a paper drug Kardex in the ED, and the availability of medications reconciliation (MR) to on-site medical or off-site rehabilitation or community-based integrated care teams without the need for transfer of a paper chart. E-MR also enables ready availability of MR for future episodes of care, providing chronological recording of medication changes, and improved legibility and standardisation of practice, as well as improved audit functionality, Ms Byrne explained.
She also discussed the Frailty Intervention Team (FIT) at CUH, the purpose of which is to ensure that frail older patients have access to interdisciplinary expertise and to help decrease their time spent in an emergency department. The goal is to manage the complete ‘episode of care’, from triage and/or admission, to a definitive place of care.
“We have done more than 9,000 e-MRs since we started last April [2025], with real-time output averages of 65 per cent MR complete of the adult population, and 75 per cent of these performed within 24 hours of admission,” Ms Byrne told the Conference. “It is now standard practice for all our pharmacists and our medication management technicians, and it has been very well received by our medical and nursing colleagues, which has meant an increasing demand for MR.”
Ms Byrne summarised: “Electronic recording of MR within the electronic patient record has enabled ready availability of MR for our current and future episodes of care in the CUH group and integrated care teams. Power BI [business intelligence] outputs from clinical or patient administration systems can be useful tools in directing patient safety initiatives to the right patients — at CUH, a BI dashboard has enabled us to significantly increase the proportion of patients with a completed MR within 24 hours of admission.”
Lived experiences in paediatric delirium
The HPAI Annual Clinical Conference 2026 heard from Mr Diarmaid Semple of the HPAI’s Education Committee. Under Mr Semple’s care and organisation, the Conference has gone from strength-to-strength over the years and at this event, he delivered a talk titled ‘A Qualitative Study of Paediatric Delirium Diagnosis and the Lived Experience of Parents’, utilising his experience as Clinical Pharmacist at Children’s Health Ireland.
Mr Semple provided an overview of paediatric delirium and a retrospective review conducted with colleagues, which identified delirious patients and found that 50 per cent of the patients studied had at least one delirium score during the duration of their hospital stay. “Every child should be screened twice a day, every day while they are in ICU,” he told the Conference. “From those who were screened, 20 per cent developed paediatric delirium.” These patients typically have an increased length of stay, are mechanically ventilated for longer, and take higher doses of morphine, midazolam, chloral and clonidine, as well as other clinical consequences.
Mr Semple conducted 11 interviews with 16 parents and/or family members to gauge their lived experience of their child’s delirium, which resulted in a thematic analysis of parents’ perception of the current delirium management model. “They felt we may not have been as cognisant of children’s normal behaviour and may have made assumptions sometimes about how children normally interact, because we only see them when they come into ICU.”
This led to Mr Semple and colleagues to develop CALM-PD, a ‘Collaborative Approach to Limiting and Managing paediatric delirium’. “Parents said that in advance of their admission, they should be informed of the risk of their child having paediatric delirium and withdrawal,” he said. “They also wanted to be better informed of the opening hours of the ICU in advance… there was a huge amount of information from parents about everything. From that, we designed interventions that are more family-centered.”
Mr Semple said: “With improvements in technology and care, we are improving the survivorship of ICU, but it’s just not good enough anymore to say, ‘well, they left alive and had all four limbs when they left the ICU’,” He summarised.
Mr Semple referred to a case of an extremely ill child who had an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, underwent emergency thoracic surgery, and underwent transplant surgery. However, he explained that to the child’s father, delirium was perhaps the most distressing aspect of his child’s illness.
“He could see the blood pressure monitor, but these were just numbers,” he told the conference. “But when she [the child] was in the bed and her eyes were rolling and she was reaching for things, he could really feel it, and that just brings to mind the things that are important to parents and families.
“If anybody out there is undertaking research, I would strongly recommend including your patients and their parents and their families in that research, so that we are not just researching ‘about’ them, but are undertaking it ‘with’ them,” he concluded.
Pharmacists’ important role in preventing adverse drug events in the frail elderly
In his talk ‘Unplanned Hospitalisation Due to Adverse Drug Events in Frail Older Adults with Cancer’, Mr Darren Walsh emphasised the need for pharmacists to add value by producing high-quality research. He highlighted a research gap on adverse drug events in frail older patients with cancer, and explained that the range of incidence is between 19-to-26 per cent of these patients. “So between a fifth and a quarter of all our patients over 70 will end up in hospital because of, or partially because of, the side-effect of a medication,” he told the attendees.
This led he and his colleagues to conduct a study at University Hospital Waterford: “People also have adverse drug event-related admissions in the absence of polypharmacy, so it is actually the nature of the medications… so we are thinking not just about the number of meds involved, but also the nature of the medications as applied in their clinical context, and that’s really important.”
He outlined how clinical pharmacists are influencing decision-making in patient care and told the conference: “We found that the prevalence of medication-related problems is really profound. Just under 60 per cent of patients had at least one clinically-significant drug interaction that the MDT agreed required intervention.”
Fifty-five per cent were on at least one potentially inappropriate medication at baseline, he explained, and 46 per cent of patients had a potentially omitted medication, with an indication or symptom that needed to be pharmacologically treated, but was not.
“We also found that our interventions were quite acceptable,” Mr Walsh continued. “Eighty-nine per cent of patients in whom we made an intervention had full or partial implementation of the recommendations because we prospectively put ourselves into the MDT.” Overall, he said, pharmacist-led medication reviews resulted in a 65 per cent statistically significant reduction in unplanned hospitalisations due to an adverse drug reaction.
Rounding-up the evidence on specialist pharmacists in the outpatients department
In her talk titled ‘A Scoping Review of Advanced or Specialist Pharmacist Roles in Hospital Outpatient Settings’, Ms Eimear McManus explained that there is widespread and ongoing expansion of advanced practice roles across healthcare, along with ambulatory care. With this in mind, Ms McManus set out to map all the available evidence worldwide on what advanced specialist pharmacists are doing in hospital outpatient settings.
Some 126 studies were included in the scoping review and she provided an overview of specialty areas in which pharmacists are working. “Oncology/haematology is the most common area [23.5 per cent], and this is followed by Cardiology [19.8 per cent],” said Ms McManus. “Within haematology, subspecialisation in anticoagulation is the most common, but oncology varied quite a lot — we had pharmacists working as generalists, but also a lot of pharmacists who developed subspecialty expertise.”
Within cardiology, over half of the pharmacists’ roles were in heart failure, and in endocrinology, over 75 per cent specialised in diabetes, she explained, however education and training resources were poorly reported across the board. In terms of governance, only 25 per cent of studies described credentialling that a pharmacist needed to undertake within the organisation, and quality assurance processes were not well described within the literature.
“We found that pharmacists are taking on diverse and advanced roles across many clinical specialties,” Ms McManus concluded. “However standards are lacking, both between organisations and also between countries. Education and training hasn’t been clearly reported and taking both of those into account, it makes it difficult to understand whether a role that was successfully implemented in one setting could be transferred to somewhere else,” she told the Conference. “There is a need for better reporting and better standardisation of education and training pathways, and we have the opportunity to strengthen the reporting of quality assurance and regulatory oversight.”
