Dr Zoe Edwards

I worked for many years as a community pharmacist in independents and large chains. In 2005, my Dad got ill with cancer and received sub-optimal care and pain relief, despite my trying to engage with the teams who treated him. Unfortunately he died in 2006, a few weeks before my youngest child was born. I continued working in a large chain and was involved in the set-up of MURs within my pharmacy. I loved doing these and saw, first hand the difference they could make to patient’s understanding of their medicines and the importance of a trusted healthcare professional to sort out any issues they had. In 2014, I saw a job advertised at the University of Bradford for a Research Pharmacist for patients with cancer pain. It was the first role of its kind in the country and was to work on an NIHR funded programme grant called IMPACCT. Of course it was something I was interested in as I had seen first hand, how care could be improved for patients with cancer and their families. Despite my complete lack of knowledge and experience of research, I got the role and ran the pharmacist arm of the study. This involved designing and delivering pharmacist educational interventions for patients with advanced cancer – like MURs – for people to optimise their medicines when they had advanced cancer. I published several papers from this work and was lucky enough to be able to do a PhD by published work which I completed in 2019.

I worked on several different projects involving cancer and heart failure after this at Bradford and Leeds Universities. During COVID I felt the pull back to practice and although I tried to satisfy this by signing up to work for 111 at weekends, I really felt that I should be patient facing and left my academic role. I started working as a Practice Pharmacist at a large PCN and also signed up to do an MSc in Advanced Practice but I kept my links at both Bradford and Leeds Universities. My background of advanced cancer pain care was not really relevant for patients in my setting as they were mostly looked after by other teams. I found a new interest in chronic pain, in particular Fibromyalgia and found most of my MSc work could be based around this, particularly as this was something other clinicians found difficult to manage. Our PCN was also very research active and I began working with the research team on pharmacy related research projects in the PCN. In 2023 I decided to apply for NIHR funding through a Senior Clinical & Practitioner Research Award to further my work on Fibromyalgia. I was successful with this application and supported by my organisation so I could spend two days a week working on my research alongside my clinical work. I was also asked to take over as Research Lead for my PCN to work with non-commercial and commercial partners to conduct research in our primary care setting.

Wherever I’ve gone in research, I have had help. From my first role at the University of Bradford to my Research Lead role now, I have had great people helping me and, most importantly, explaining all the acronyms! There are some brilliant mentoring programmes for any career stage which will pair you up with knowledgeable friendly faces but the research world is also full of lovely people who are ready and willing to help others.

 

The most important thing about any research is it needs to interest you. Something may resonate with you for personal reasons (as it did with me) or you may have strengths in certain areas or see a gap in patient care. You need to think – what is the area that really excites me or I want to spend more time on? What are the gaps in this area that interest me and how can I fill them? It doesn’t have to be all at once, it can just be little bits at a time but the biggest thing for me is the passion to make a difference about a subject that sparks your curiosity.

 

I’m immensely proud of my clinical academic role. My mentor once said to me that my clinical role adds more credibility to my academic role and I completely agree. I know what problems there are with helping patients with Fibromyalgia as I see them in practice and I hear what other clinicians tell me about how they treat the condition too. I’m also proud to have gained a role as Clinical Research Lead in a PCN which non-medics don’t often get the chance to take up. There is no reason that research needs to be done by medical doctors. Pharmacists (and other health care professionals) are ideally placed to conduct and lead research and there is a national move to enable us to do this. Changes in rules for Principal Investigators for new medicines (now not having to be medics) and new funding streams promoting non-medics encourage and enable us to go where we want to go. We just need to take these opportunities when they arise and ask for help when we need it.