Dara O'Donoghue

Queen's University Belfast | QUB · Centre for Medical Education

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Many children are simply shown how to use inhalers which results in less than 50%...

Incorrect inhaler technique and non-adherence to inhaled preventer therapy often is the cause of poorly controlled asthma. Detecting and correcting non-adherence in asthma therapy has proven difficult. In addition, while patients may be able to demonstrate correct inhaler technique at the clinic recent evidence suggests that critical errors in inha...

Asthma is one of the most common chronic disorders of childhood. The typical symptoms are a result of reversible airway obstruction. There is no ‘gold-standard’ test to diagnose asthma, but the most commonly used investigation to help with a diagnosis is spirometry. This article outlines some of the technical aspects of spirometry together with how...

The benefits of involving patients and the public in medical education are well documented, however there is a need to further explore how this can be translated to the setting of paediatric medical education. This article aims to identify how organisations can facilitate the involvement of paediatric patients and their parents/carers. While involv...

Background Many children attend Emergency Departments (ED) and Out of Hours (OoH) frequently for acute asthma. Follow up care is often suboptimal leaving these children at risk of a future attacks. We report on the development, implementation and evaluation of a safe asthma discharge care pathway (SADCP). Methods This is a retrospective report on...

Background Asthma is the most common chronic childhood condition. Unfortunately, many children have poorly controlled asthma. Current guidelines strongly recommend that all asthma review appointments must include an assessment of the patient’s inhaler technique. However, most guidelines do not provide information on how the healthcare professional...

Background: Mothers smoking while pregnant is known to increase the offspring risk of subsequent wheezing or asthma. It is less well known whether this phenomenal occurs trans-generationally, which would suggest potential epigenetic transfer. If a link is identified, this would strengthen the need for anti-smoking strategies during pregnancy and wo...

Background It is recognised that newly qualified doctors feel unprepared in many areas of their daily practice and that there is a gap between what students learn during medical school and their clinical responsibilities early in their postgraduate career. This study aimed to assess if undergraduate students and junior paediatric doctors met a Mini...

Introduction Chronic disease in childhood is becoming more prevalent worldwide. Self-management skills can only be taught with effective communication between the health care worker and the patient or primary care provider. ‘Teach-back’ is one proposed method for providing this education which has yielded success in adult populations but is not yet...

This is a case report of a 2 year old child who presented with multiple acute life-threatening episodes post repair of a tracheo-oesophageal fistula secondary to pressure on the trachea posteriorly from a distended oesophagus and anteriorly from bracehocephalic artery compression.

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Many children are simply shown how to use inhalers which results in less than 50%...

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Many children are simply shown how to use inhalers which results in less than 50%...

Abstract Children may present with difficult to treat asthma for a number of reasons. It may be that they truly have therapy resistant asthma but usually this is not the case. Using a structured multi- disciplinary approach we describe how the difficult-to-treat asthma clinic delineates children who are symptomatic due to ongoing issues that can...

Introduction Nocturnal pulse oximetry can be used to screen for obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) using the McGill Oximetry Score (MOS). The MOS has a time threshold for a technically adequate study of 6 hours. It has been suggested that one night of oximetry is sufficient to screen for OSA using the MOS. Aims (1) To evaluate night-to-night variation...

Background: One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Current guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Currently, many children are simply shown how to use inhalers (brief int...

Background This study aimed to evaluate how undergraduate students and junior paediatric doctors performed against an examination of knowledge set by non-academic consultants at a “must –know “ level for starting in paediatrics. We named this the Minimum Accepeted Competency (MAC) examination.Methods Examination (comprised of 30 MCQ questions) was...

Background It is recognised that newly qualified doctors feel unprepared in many areas of their daily practice and that there is a gap between what students learn during medical school and their clinical responsibilities early in their postgraduate career. This study aimed to assess if undergraduate students and junior paediatric doctors met a Mini...

Aim The early administration of antibiotics in sepsis reduces mortality and improves outcomes. This randomised control trial evaluated the effect of environmental priming (EP) on healthcare student performance in a simulated paediatric sepsis scenario. Methods Medical and nursing students were randomised into primed and unprimed groups. Primed gro...

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Current guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Currently many children are simply shown how to use inhalers (brief Instru...

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Current guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Currently many children are simply shown how to use inhalers (brief Instru...

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Current guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Currently many children are simply shown how to use inhalers (brief interv...

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Current guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Currently many children are simply shown how to use inhalers (brief interv...

Background One reason that asthma remains poorly controlled in children is poor inhaler technique. Current guidelines recommend checking inhaler technique at each clinical visit. However, they do not specify how best to train children to mastery of correct inhaler technique. Currently many children are simply shown how to use inhalers (brief interv...

Aims To determine the exposure and attitudes of paediatric trainees towards adolescent medicine. Methods All paediatric trainees in the Northern Ireland deanery (n=107) were invited to participate in an online survey in March 2016. The questionnaire was based on the ‘Modified Perceptions of Adolescent Issues and Resources: Care of Adolescents’ que...

Introduction Time delays in the delivery of emergency treatment in a resuscitation can be detrimental to patient care.¹ Multiple factors have been implicated as causes of such delays. These include hospital related factors such as the time taken to access emergency equipment.² Recommendations have previously been made regarding standardisation of r...

Aims Time delays in the delivery of emergency treatment can be detrimental to patient care. Multiple factors have been implicated as causes of such delays including the time taken to access emergency equipment. This randomised control trial aimed to evaluate the impact of environmental priming on student performance in a simulated paediatric emerge...

Background: The relationship between confidence and competence in clinical skills development is complex but important. This study aims to determine undergraduate paediatric student confidence in performing three common paediatric clinical skills framed as Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) scenarios and to compare this with subseque...

Background Sleep-disordered breathing is a common and serious feature of many paediatric conditions and is particularly a problem in children with Down syndrome. Overnight pulse oximetry is recommended as an initial screening test, but it is unclear how overnight oximetry results should be interpreted and how many nights should be recorded. Methods...

Aims Since inception in 2006 an Inter-professional Education (IPE) project has become embedded within Children’s Nursing and Medical Curricula at an internationally recognised university. Inter-professional high-fidelity simulation teaching using SimBaby® has been developed to provide an integrated approach to student learning and highlights the im...

Aims Approximately 240 4th year medical students from Queen’s University Belfast rotate through paediatric units in N. Ireland each year. Paediatric Objective Structured Clinical Examinations revealed poor performance at prescribing paediatric medication despite attendance at an Interprofessional Pharmacy Workshop. The aim of this study is to asses...

Background Chronic cough is a common childhood symptom, reported in 22% of preschool children. Many are misdiagnosed as asthmatic. Induced sputum (IS) using hypertonic saline (HTS) has been used as a diagnostic tool in patients with cough; its bronchoconstriction effects being used as a test for the bronchial hyper-reactivity (BHR) in asthma (ISSAC...

Human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) causes severe respiratory disease in infants. Airway epithelial cells are the principle targets of RSV infection. However, the mechanisms by which it causes disease are poorly understood. Most RSV pathogenesis data are derived using laboratory-adapted prototypic strains. We hypothesized that such strains may...

There is a need for reproducible and effective models of pediatric bronchial epithelium to study disease states such as asthma. We aimed to develop, characterize, and differentiate an effective, an efficient, and a reliable three-dimensional model of pediatric bronchial epithelium to test the hypothesis that children with asthma differ in their epi...

 Miliary neonatal hemangiomatosis is a rare, life-threatening condition associated with cutaneous and multiorgan involvement. We report two infants with this condition who had fulminant cardiac failure and cardiac septal hypertrophy. The first was a 5-day-old boy who presented with increasing numbers of cutaneous hemangiomata associated with worsen...