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Staff Profile

Professor Adam Todd

Professor of Pharmaceutical Public Health

Background

Adam Todd is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Public Health, and Deputy Head of the School of Pharmacy at Newcastle University. He is a qualified pharmacist registered with the General Pharmaceutical Council, and a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. He was previously a Senior Lecturer at Durham University where he held the roles of MPharm Programme Director, Director of Education, and Deputy Director of the Centre of Health and Inequalities Research (CHIR). He was awarded a Readership in 2017, and a personal Chair in 2021.

His research is highly interdisciplinary, and uses methods from the social sciences, public health, clinical medicine, and epidemiology. He leads a programme of research that applies pharmaceutical knowledge to prevent disease, prolong life, promote health, and reduce health inequalities, across different populations. His research outputs have had considerable impact on policy and practice.

Adam has a number of international research collaborations across Europe, the United States and Australia. He is a member of CHAIN, the Centre of Global Health Inequalities Research – a leading international research centre that seeks to monitor, explain, and reduce inequalities in health. He is also a steering group member of the English Deprescribing Network (EDeN) – a network established to reduce inappropriate and problematic polypharmacy through deprescribing.

He has experience of serving on national research committees, and has previously contributed to the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit Committee for the Yorkshire & North East region; he is currently a member of the NIHR HTA Prioritisation Committee for community health and social care. Adam also chairs the Scientific Advisory Panel for Pharmacy Research UK - the principal research charity supporting pharmacy to improve healthcare for the benefit of patients and the public.

Adam has total career research funding of over £15 million, including funding from the NIHR, Macmillan Cancer Research, the Barbour Foundation, and the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation. Adam reviews for more than 30 international peer reviewed journals, serves on a number of journal editorial boards, and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles, as well as an international patent.

In addition to his research activities, Adam is also actively involved in delivering the MPharm Programme at Newcastle; he approaches pharmacy education in an integrated way, and combines both science and practice elements in his teaching. Using this integrated approach, Adam has published two international books focusing on antibacterial and anticancer therapeutics. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and has previously served as academic member of the General Pharmaceutical Council Accreditation and Recognition Panel.

Adam still contributes to the care of patients on a regular basis; he works alongside the specialist palliative care Multidisciplinary Team at St. Benedict’s Hospice, providing guidance on (de)prescribing; he also regularly works as a community pharmacist delivering public health interventions to the local community.

Research

Adam is involved in a range regional, national, and international multidisciplinary projects focusing on pharmaceutical public health and health inequalities.


Current PhD students:

Rayah Asiri (funded by the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) who is exploring the challenges of medication adherence in minority ethnic communities

Janine Beezer (supported by The British Society for Heart Failure) who is examining the relationships between polypharmacy and adverse outcomes in people with heart failure

Dr. Maguy El Hajj (self-funded) who is investigating the challenges of delivering medication safety initiatives in community pharmacy settings

Katie Elliott (funded through The Barbour Foundation) who is investigating the relationship between mental health condition and treatment receipt amongst older people with cancer

Hilary Shepherd Holding (funded through The Dunhill Medical Trust) who is exploring the interplay between multimorbidity and polypharmacy amongst older people

Anum Iqbal (supported by the NIHR ARC NENC) who is exploring socioeconomic inequalities in polypharmacy amongst older people

Tania Jones (supported by the School of Pharmacy) who is developing and evaluating a novel opioid deprescribing intervention in primary care

Amber Sacre (funded through the NIHR ARC NENC) who is exploring socioeconomic inequalities in vaccination

 

 



Teaching

Adam is a passionate educator and teacher, and has contributed to the development of a number of innovative pharmacy programmes in the UK. He strongly believes that an integrated approach to pharmacy education – combining both science and practice elements – is the cornerstone to a successful MPharm degree.

He has extensive experience of developing new programmes, and was part of the team at Durham University that developed a highly innovative MPharm degree programme, which gained full accreditation with the General Pharmaceutical Council (the independent regulator for pharmacy education in the UK) without any conditions or recommendations. Adam has been external examiner at a number of different Schools of Pharmacy, as well as an academic member of the General Pharmaceutical Council Accreditation and Recognition Panel.

He has occupied a range of leadership positions in higher education, including Module Leader, Year Leader, Programme Director and Chair of Education Committee. He also has experience of developing work-based learning within an MPharm degree, and was one of the first that attempted to embed students in different communities of practice where they undertake genuine peripheral participation within clinical environments. 

Adam has an important role in teaching the MPharm degree at Newcastle, and contributes to a number of stages and modules. His teaching is regularly recognised by students as some of the best in the University. In recent years, he has developed a series of small case-based integration sessions that allow students to contextualise their learning and apply key concepts of science to solve simple clinical problems often encountered by patients.






    



Publications