Dr Kieran Dalton is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacy at University College Cork. Kieran has published a wealth of research involving the development and evaluation of pharmacist-led interventions across a range of healthcare settings involving interprofessional teams – including primary care, hospitals, intermediate care, nursing homes, and specialist palliative care settings. Kieran’s research has demonstrated the positive impacts that pharmacists can have on both patients and healthcare systems – such as improving medication appropriateness, enhancing medication understanding, reducing medication-related harm, and decreasing medication costs.

Kieran’s special interest area is optimising older adults’ medications, and he has practised as a pharmacist in hospital pharmacy, community pharmacy, and long-term care settings. He is passionate about reducing medication-related harm and is a world-leading researcher on prescribing cascades (i.e. where drugs are prescribed to manage the adverse effects of other drugs). Kieran was part of the iKASCADE consortium which developed ‘ThinkCascades’, a tool which helps identify prescribing cascades in older people.

As well as iKASCADE, Kieran has been involved several large international multidisciplinary collaborations, including many Delphi consensus studies and two randomised controlled trials which evaluated medication optimisation interventions in multimorbid older people (SENATOR and OPTIMATE). Furthermore, at a national level, he was appointed to the Research Sub-Committee of the Expert Taskforce for Pharmacy, where he helped guide Ireland’s research priorities relating to expanding pharmacy roles.

Kieran has been leading the evalution of the iSIMPATHY project in the Republic of Ireland, which involved implementing pharmacist-led person-centred medication reviews in general practice settings. In recognition of this work, as well as several other research initiatives evaluating pharmacy practice changes, Kieran won the Practice Based Research Award at the inaugural Pharmacy Excellence Awards in 2024.