Position: Professor of Primary Care Medicine, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
Personal
Dr Susan Smith joined the Department of General Practice at RCSI in 2011. She also works as a general practitioner in Inchicore Family Doctors, Dublin. She completed vocational training in general practice in the UK in 1991 and has undertaken clinical work in general practice since then within the UK, Australia and Ireland.
Research/Teaching
She completed an MSc (economics) in the University of Wales in Health Planning and Development in 1994. She worked as a Research Fellow in General Practice in the University of South Australia, in Adelaide from 1997 to 1998. She then returned to Ireland where she took up a post as Lecturer in General Practice in University College Dublin where she undertook her MD, a randomised controlled trial of diabetes shared care (DiSC). She then worked as Senior Lecturer in Primary Care in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care in Trinity College Dublin.
Her main research interests include chronic disease and medicines management and she leads the CPCR research programme into multimorbidity (multiple chronic conditions). She has been the Principal Investigator (PI) on six HRB funded clinical trials of interventions to improve outcomes for patients with chronic conditions. She is the lead author on the Cochrane review for interventions to improve outcomes for patients with multimorbidity. She is also engaged in the CPCRs programmes on polypharmacy, potentially inappropriate prescribing, computerised decision support systems, clinical prediction rules and examining variation in clinical practice. She is a PI on one of the two funded trials of the Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland, the SPPiRE study which is a follow on definitive RCT of the OPTISCRIPT intervention. She is an active contributor and editor within the Cochrane Collaboration. Since being awarded a HRB Cochrane Fellowship in 2003 she has undertaken or updated nine further reviews and is on the editorial board of the Acute Respiratory Infections Cochrane Review Group. She is the Clinical Lead on the HRB CICER programme which is a collaboration between the CPCR and HIQA, led by Dr Mairin Ryan. She is the PI on an RCQPS funded project exploring the impact of GP based pharmacists, which is a collaboration with the National Medicines Management Programme, led by Prof Michael Barry. She has recently been awarded a HRB Collaborative Doctoral Award to lead a PhD Programme in Multimorbidity commencing in 2018. She is also a co-editor of the Journal of Comorbidity and is on the editorial boards of the journals Family Practice and BMC Family Practice.