Northern Health and Social Care Trust

This study aims to explore how body fat influences the response to either 25 or 50 mg of daily iron supplements during pregnancy. We will conduct a double-blind randomized controlled intervention study involving 312 pregnant women recruited from antenatal clinics in the Northern Trust Area. Participants will be randomly assigned to receive either 25 or 50 mg of iron per day from 12 weeks of pregnancy until delivery, using the Active Iron supplement brand. Blood samples will be collected at 12, 28 and 36 weeks gestation and umbilical cord blood will be collected at delivery. Anthropometric measurements will be taken at each visit, and participants will complete questionnaires on various aspects of health and lifestyle, mental health, gastrointestinal symptoms, and compliance.

The Smart & Healthy Ageing through People Engaging in Supportive Systems (SHAPES) Innovation Action is a Horizon 2020, EU-wide project looking at how technology can enable the older population to live healthier lives at home. It involves the development, piloting and deployment of a large scale, EU-standardised open platform. This platform will integrate with a wide-range of technological, organisational, clinical, educational and societal solutions seeking to facilitate long-term healthy and active aging.
Within this project are 7 pilot themes investigating various potential uses of the platform, in Northern Ireland we are leading on medicines control and optimisation.
This pilot is focused on identifying, managing and improving deficiencies in adherence to medicines and treatments of older individuals living with permanent or temporary reduced functions or capabilities due to chronic, age-related illnesses and living at home. Digital Solutions (including blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, weight scales and glucometers) will be used to enable self-monitoring of the individual's physiological parameters. Data will also be used to develop an algorithm to help predict decompensations in participants with heart failure and dynamic personal ranges will also be developed. In the future this may enable early opportunities to adjust medicines and treatments so as to deliver safer and more effective use of medicines in-home, however, in this pilot there will be no changes to treatment.
The target population is composed of older individuals (+65 years) living at home with heart failure and/or diabetes. We aim to recruit 30 people (for 3 months) to our pilot in Northern Ireland. We are working closely with colleagues in Spain, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Germany to run similar pilots within their healthcare systems.

Antimicrobial stewardship groups ensure the safe and prudent use of antibiotics, decrease antimicrobial resistance, lower costs of antimicrobials in hospital settings and improve patient safety in terms of prescribing plausibility. Significant success of the implementation of antimicrobial stewardship programmes have been shown in studies across the world. It is important to highlight this issue not only because of the current alarming resistance situation but also to encourage Austrian stakeholders and politicians to start to implement such programmes on a larger scale all across Austria.