barry o'donovan

Barry O’ Donovan is a Lecturer in the Discipline of General Practice, NUI Galway. Current main role is within the Clinical Methods Programme, but also teaching on other programmes. Interests include educational experiences of undergraduate medical students and educational assessment. Barry enjoys foraging and maintaining links with other disciplines and other centres and he views this as a means of enriching the educational experiences of students and the research opportunities for all involved.

Research Interests

Health Services Research:

• Author of a paper on death certification in General Practice, done in collaboration with the GP Trainers in Donegal.
• Co-authored a study into attitudes to chronic back pain among health professionals.

Educational Research:

• An academic interest of Barry’s is the educational experiences of medical students. His Masters in Clinical Education thesis focussed on the experiences of Malaysian medical students in NUI G.

Current work

• Involved in preparing for the new curriculum in which the core GP course moved from 5th (of 6) years to the 4th (of 5) years in 2009-2010, and sees a much-expanded General Practice element and potential integrated OSCE examinations with other specialties. This links into the spiralling curriculum which sees the students getting a greater clinical component to their medical education right from the beginning. There are other innovations, such as the use of Blackboard online system to share educational material such as lectures in both PowerPoint and video format. This technology is going to assist in the development of affiliated centres for student teaching along the Western seaboard which started in Sligo in September 2009.
• A Special Study Module (SSM) for students on the ClinicalMethods course entitled "Community Learning: Teaching Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) to primary-school children

Roles outside the university:

• A practicing General Practitioner in Turloughmore Health Centre, Lackagh, Co Galway. This is two full days per week Tuesday and Thursday, with occasional extra sessions. Barry has been involved in setting up a minor surgery clinic within the practice and also teaches medical students on the Early Patient Contact programme (1MB and 2MB) and the General Practice course (4MB)
• GPIT Tutor for the HSE West region for the ICGP. This involves coordinating I.T. issues of individual GPs and practices, and attending meetings with other tutors, aimed at addressing policy with regard to I.T. and looking at recent innovations.
• Assistant Programme Director (APD) of the Western Vocational Training Programme for General Practice. This is a joint HSE/ICGP appointment and means weekly contact with GP Registrars and organising and delivering teaching to them on their programme.
• An examiner for the Membership of the Irish College of General Practitioners (MICGP). This involves curriculum development, setting and marking written questions and being an examiner at the viva.
• A member of the Assessors’ Group of the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP). This group oversees the GP Training Programmes of Ireland, ensuring the curriculum of the ICGP is delivered and standards are maintained.

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching:

• Coordinating and teaching on the Clinical Methods course.
• Lecturing and small-group teaching on the 4MB General Practice course

Postgraduate Teaching:

• Preparing, delivering and assessing the Cardiovascular Disease (CVD)
• Module of the Postgraduate Diplomas in Clinical Primary Care and Practice Nursing.
• Teaching on the Postgraduate Diploma in Clinical Teaching

Selected Publications

• Doctors' attitudes and beliefs regarding acute low back pain management: A systematic review. Fullen BM, Baxter GD, O'Donovan BG, Doody C, Daly L, Hurley DA. Pain. 2008 Jun; 136(3):388-96. Epub 2008 Apr 18. Review. PMID: 18395982
• Factors impacting on doctors' management of acute low back pain: A systematic review. Fullen BM, Baxter GD, O'Donovan BG, Doody C, Daly LE, Hurley DA. Eur J Pain. 2008 Dec 23. [Epub ahead of print].
• A mixed-methods prospective study of death certification in general practice. O’Donovan Barry, Armstrong Paul, Byrne Mary, Murphy Andrew. Funded by ICGP and NUI, Galway (€10,000 in total). Accepted for publication by “Family Practice” in February 2010.
• An exploration of the educational and life experiences of Malaysian Medical students in an Irish medical school. O’Donovan Barry, Flaherty Gerard, Byrne, Mary, Cantillon, Peter. Thesis for Masters in Clinical Education, awaiting publication.
  
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