Communicating risk to health professionals and patients

The 12th biennial Congress of the European Association for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (http://eacpt.eu) is underway in Madrid from 27th to 30th June 2015. Over 500 abstracts have been accepted from 66 countries and form all 5 continents for presentation as e-posters and oral presentations. the 54 oral presentations are eligible for an award for the best talk. 
 
During one of the main panel discussions at the EACPT Congress in Madrid,  communicating risk to health professionals and patients was discussed by Barbara Rath (Germany), Almath Spooner (Ireland), Frederic Bouder (The Netherlands), Cristina Cabrita (Portugal) and Dolores Montero (Spain).

Listen to the panel discussing challenges when communicating risk, current initiatives in risk communication, risk perception and related issues.

More on the speaker panel

Almath Spooner is the Pharmacovigilance and Risk Management Lead at the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA), Dublin, Ireland, where she has held a number of assessment and management roles since first joining the National Competent Authority (formerly the IMB).  Dr. Spooner has been the Vice Chair of the European Medicines Agency’s Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee since its establishment in 2012. She is also the PRAC Member for Ireland. She was formerly a member of the CHMP’s Pharmacovigilance Working Party.
Dr. Spooner is a member of the Heads of Medicines Agencies’ European Risk Management Strategy Facilitation Group, a core member of the EMA’s Incident Review Network and has represented the EU at the International Conference on Harmonisation. Dr. Spooner is a pharmacist by training with a PhD in pharmacy and additional postgraduate qualifications in statistics and pharmaceutical medicine. Before joining the IMB, she had experience in clinical and academic pharmacy.
Link to the HPRA website:   http://www.hpra.ie 

Cristina Cabrita is a Senior Project officer with DECO Proteste, a Non-Governmental Organization interested in consumer defence, health and public health. She trained as a pharmacist at the Instituto Superior de Ciências da Saúde-Sul in Portugal. She also has a Masters in Public Health from the National School of Public health in Lisbon. She Since 2009, she has been a member of the expert panel of the EMA-European Medicine Agency, for reviews of information on medicinal products. She has also been an observer on the EMA’s Pharmacovigilance Working Group.Since  February  2014 she has been a member of the expert health  team for BEUC (Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs: the European Bureau for Consumer Unions).