RCSI School of Physiotherapy hosted the Inaugural RCSI Hospitals Physiotherapy Research Symposium on Tuesday, 23 May. This one day event brought the academic staff from RCSI School of Physiotherapy together with clinicians and managers from the RCSI Hospitals, including Beaumont, Connolly, Rotunda, Cavan and Monaghan hospitals, Louth County hospital and Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Drogheda to present patient –focussed research in topics such as dementia, frailty, musculoskeletal pain, oncology and Parkinson’s disease. Newly appointed RCSI StAR lecturer Dr Grace O’Malley who will be based between Division of Population Health Sciences and School of Physiotherapy presented the keynote address on Harnessing research to transform care in paediatric obesity.
Symposium organiser Dr Helen French, Senior lecturer, RCSI School of Physiotherapy explained how this symposium was important in bringing academic and clinical physiotherapists together to collaborate on clinically meaningful research. ‘We have already have a strong relationship with Beaumont and Connolly hospitals through our PACT (Partnership of Academics and Clinicians in Therapy) research group and we look forward to extending this collaboration with the all physiotherapy departments within the RCSI Hospitals group. There are many great initiatives in research and quality improvement taking place across the various sites and we can pool our collective expertise to produce meaningful changes for the patients within the healthcare system. We hope this will be an annual event on our calendar’.