Tim Delaney is Head of Pharmacy at Tallaght Hospital, Dublin, Ireland. A Pharmacy graduate of Trinity College Dublin (1983), he later obtained his M.Sc. in Management (Organisational Behaviour) at the Irish Management Institute/ Trinity College Dublin in 2007.
He has worked 33 years in the acute hospital service, 17 years in wider portfolio management roles involving research and quality. Under his leadership in 2003 the Tallaght Hospital became an early adopter of Six Sigma. The Tallaght Six Sigma Programme won a Taoiseach’s (Prime Minister of Ireland) Award for Public Service Excellence in 2005. Tim also led the establishment at Tallaght Hospital of the first hospital medication safety programme in Ireland in 2000, winning the inaugural National Quality & Safety Award of the Irish Society for Quality and Safety in Healthcare in 2006.
Tim was the only pharmacist member of the Ministerial Commission on Quality and Patient Safety which published its report Building a Culture of Patient Safety in March 2009. This watershed report has had a major influence on government strategy in relation to patient safety. It eventually led to the adoption by the Irish Health Service Executive of Medication Reconciliation as a standard of care in 2014.
When Tallaght Hospital opened in 1998, Tim established a doctoral research programme in collaboration with the TCD School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences. This was the first programme of its type in Ireland, with two strands, applied pharmacokinetics and pharmaceutical care practice. The pharmaceutical care practice research eventually led to the development of the PACT Clinical Pharmacy Service based on evidence from research led by Prof. Tamasine Grimes. This was piloted in 2012 then rolled out starting in 2015. PACT roll-out contines with ongoing research and evaluation to this day.