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News in Brief
| Evolutionary Teachings |
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| Monday, 16 March 2009 09:43 | |
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Following in the exemplary footsteps of Professor Sean Gorman, the new head of Queen's University Belfast's School of Pharmacy is relishing the opportunity to maintain and develop the high quality of teaching and research within the School. Although Professor David Woolfson is new to the role, he is not new to the School, having been Director of Research and Chair in Pharmaceutics for the past 15 years. Laure James met with Professor Woolfson for his first interview since taking up the position.You can trace my involvement with the School back to before it was known as such, in the days when it was just a small Department of Pharmacy, he began. It transferred from the Belfast College of Technology to the Queen's campus before I graduated and all we had then was a staff of 6 lecturers housed in 40 Elmwood Avenue and in temporary (they lasted almost 30 years) wooden huts on the site of what is now our McClay Research Centre, so the School has certainly come a long way over the intervening years. The School of Pharmacy at Queen's is now one of the most successful in the UK and Professor Woolfson believes that a combination of external funding, a commitment to high quality teaching and the hard work and dedication of all the School's staff account for this. The School has developed rapidly over the last 10 years, in particular, with support from the University, which has recognised us as a key professional subject in the Health Sciences. We have also had great support from Sir Allen McClay, of Almac Group and formerly local pharmaceutical company Galen, and from Dr. John King, formerly Executive Chair of US company Warner Chilcott. Their generous funding has enabled us to open up new areas of research, build state-of the-art facilities and enhance provision for the MPharm degree course. Independent assessments of both teaching quality and, most recently, the UK-wide Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) have both confirmed the School's leading position. Professor Woolfson, who draws an affectionate comparison between the competitive nature of university performance and Premier League football, explained; We effectively have lots of league tables, a transfer market with people moving in advance of an RAE exercise, or the big cup competition! and then injections of external funding. Although the School may be without a Russian oligarch behind it, the professor maintains that access to sufficient resources and their effective use are paramount. It is down to how funding is utilised in a strategic way to develop new areas that have the capacity to become self-supporting and can deliver real value for our customers, who are our students, the profession and, ultimately, patients, he said. As the needs of patients and the profession change, so must the Pharmacy degree course change, so we have been in the vanguard of introducing innovative methodologies, particularly for the teaching of clinical and practice-based elements of the MPharm. Teaching that is not supported by research is not really university level teaching, it is just the transfer of knowledge second-hand. That is why our successful and growing research programmes are so important to the quality of our teaching and the MPharm curriculum. This is not simply a vague concept; it has real meaning and translates as lecturing staff teaching, inspiring and motivating, from their own experience. I believe that the underpinning of pharmacy as a profession has to lie in the pharmaceutical sciences. If there is no understanding of the basic sciences then, ultimately, there will be no new drugs, no new medicines and, consequently, no advances in treatment. Integration of the laboratory sciences, clinical pharmacy and pharmacy practice is the key to a successful pharmacy school and a leading-edge pharmacy degree course. Maintaining its investment in superb teaching facilities, the School recently opened a new computer suite within the professional practice area, supported by a well known local company. We have had a lot of valuable support from McLernons Computers and the new 'Pharmacy' and its suite of computer terminals complete with MPS software is an excellent way of helping to introduce practice-based learning into the course, he added. We have a number of teacher-practitioners and teaching fellows in, or associated with, the school who bring vast experience to their teaching and make an invaluable contribution to training the next generation of pharmacists. We also have quite an extensive programme of clinical interaction training, with structured clinical visits and placements that now extend throughout the duration of the course, and which Prof. Sean Gorman was instrumental in introducing, with support from the University, the DHSSPS and the Hospital trusts. It means that our students get a wide range of experience, even before they enter their pre-registration year. Talk of a five year degree course has concerned many in academia and as Professor Woolfson insists, a great deal of forward planning and funding would be necessary before an integrated approach that would incorporate pre-registration into the degree programme is taken. The recent White Paper on pharmacy in England advocates a greater clinical involvement in the MPharm course and integration of the 'fifth year' is one way to do this. However, there are issues regarding funding, resources, pre-registration placements and other serious concerns. There is also the issue of the future of regulation and professional representation, and possible differences in registration procedures between Great Britain and Northern Ireland that may affect us. As a leading pharmacy school we have to be focused on implications for the UK-wide accreditation of MPharm courses in Northern Ireland that could arise from these changes, for example, there may be a restricted remit for accreditation by the new General Pharmaceutical Council in GB that could leave NI schools in an anomalous position. This will need discussion and consultation with Government and all the professional bodies. Professor Woolfson is keen to ensure that the School continues to engage with the profession, both locally and further afield, not least in publicising the work of the School across its various research specialities. Future medicines will present new challenges for the pharmacist, he believes. We are moving into the area of highly specialised, macromolecular therapeutic entities, for example, monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic peptides and proteins, and gene delivery. Testing their quality and how there are produced and eventually formulated is difficult as these are molecules with limited stability and non-oral absorption profiles, the professor added. This presents new challenges and we have developed, as quite a deliberate strategy, an entirely new part of our research effort to focus on these challenges. To be a leading pharmacy school in terms of research anywhere in the western world, these are key areas that you need to be working in. We already had good foundations in pharmaceutics and in clinical and community practice. Now we are integrating these with new developments at the molecular level. Moving into the McClay Research Centre was a sea-change for the School. It permitted us to double our capacity but now we have outgrown even that and have had to expand further on the Queen's Health Sciences campus. Dr John King, who started his career in medicinal chemistry, recently gave the School a very generous gift of £2million to 'kick start' a new research programme in drug discovery and later this month the School will be opening a new laboratory for medicinal chemistry. We have recruited people from around the world to work within this facility, a process which took us to Germany, Italy and most recently to Russia, he added. The School is becoming very international in terms of its staffing and diverse in terms of its backgrounds and expertise. We have not restricted ourselves to those who come from a traditional pharmacy background like myself; we have medicinal chemists, biologists, microbiologists, social scientists, pharmaceutical engineers, molecular biologists, in fact, a plethora of disciplines that reflects the multidisciplinary nature of pharmacy. Nevertheless, we are, first and foremost, a School of Pharmacy. The development of the School over recent years has been exponential, and it now has connections and partnerships with other leading institutions worldwide in both the science and practice of pharmacy. For example, we have a world leading position in terms of the development of novel drug delivery systems for the prevention of HIV/AIDS, as part of international efforts to control the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. This work alone has resulted in multi-million pound research grants and shows that research is not an 'ivory tower' activity but has practical relevance to real people. There are many other areas of our work which are similarly of obvious relevance, such as our work on paediatric medicines and drug utilisation in nursing homes, but our fundamental research involving cutting edge techniques in molecular and cell biology, gene therapy, peptide biochemistry and novel polymers for medical devices is just as important. These areas represent the future of pharmacy-derived treatments. The development of new treatments is a long process, but we are always looking at how we can contribute to the overall aim of improving health, whether through the training of future pharmacists or by the application of novel research to provide real patient benefits. I have no doubt that the profession of pharmacy has a bright future, and the Schools of Pharmacy collectively have a major role to play in ensuring that this will be the case. |