Pauline Meskell is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Nursing & Midwifery in EHS Faculty at the University of Limerick.

Pauline's research interests lie in the areas of self-management of chronic diseases including renal disease, Ageing, Dementia, outcome measurement, and Evidence Synthesis. Pauline has particular methodological expertise around quantitative and qualitative evidence synthesis, conventional and policy Delphi, instrument development, and outcome measurement. She is a member of the teaching faculty of Evidence Synthesis Ireland (ESI) and co-lead of the Qualitative Evidence Synthesis arm of ESI.

She is currently involved in a number of both Cochrane and non-Cochrane systematic reviews and qualitative evidence syntheses. She has collaborated on projects funded by the Health Research Board (Ireland), Department of Health and Children (Ireland), National Council for the Professional Development of Nursing and Midwifery (Ireland), and Institute of Public Health. Pauline teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

Her teaching interests are in all aspects of nursing, particularly acute and chronic care, advanced physical assessment and research. She has extensive experience of teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students across a variety of topic areas and have been involved in teaching on allied health care programmes such as medicine, psychology and paramedics. Pauline has extensive experience in programme management and curriculum development at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Her current research projects include the use of sensory cueing systems in the management of Freezing of Gait (FOG) in Parkinson's Disease, exploring the experiences of patients transitioning onto dialysis, development of a communication tool to facilitate patient transfer from long stay care to acute care and exploring the factors that influence recruitment to clinical trials.

Publications

Wuytack, F., Regan, M., Biesty, L., Meskell, P.,  Lutomski, J. E., O’Donnell, M., Treweek, S. & Devane, D. (2019). Risk of bias assessment of sequence generation: a study of 100 systematic reviews of trials. Systematic Reviews. 8: 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-018-0924-1   

Sweeney, D., Quinlan, L., Browne, P., Richardson, M. & Meskell, P. & ÓLaighin, G. (2019). A Technological Review of Wearable Cueing Devices Addressing Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's Disease. Sensors. 19 (1277): 1-35. https://doi.org/10.3390/s19061277

Casey, D., Lynch, U., Murphy, K., Cooney, A., Gannon, M., Houghton, C., Hunter, A., Jordan, F., Smyth, S., Felzmann, H. & Meskell, P. (2019). Telling a ‘good or white lie’: The views of people living with dementia and their carers. Dementia. https://doi.org/10.1177/1471301219831525

Healy, P., Edwards, P.J., Smith, V., Murphy, E., Newell, J., Burke, E., Meskell, P., & Galvin, S., Lynn, P., Stovold, E., Mccarthy, B., Biesty, L. & Devane, D. (2018). Design-based methods to influence the completeness of response to self-administered questionnaires. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.MR000048

Biesty, L., Egan, A.M., Dunne, F., Smith, V. & Meskell, P., Dempsey, E., Ni Bhuinneain, G.M. & Devane, D. (2018). Planned birth at or near term for improving health outcomes for pregnant women with pre-existing diabetes and their infants. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD01291010. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6491311/