DrOlga Cleary

Olga’s work has had a sustained impact on population health policy, research infrastructure, and service delivery at both national and international levels. With over two decades of experience bridging research, policy, and practice, she has played a central role in shaping health system reform in Ireland, particularly in the areas of chronic disease, multimorbidity, and integrated care. Her doctoral research on multimorbidity in older adults, using data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), provided a population-level evidence base that challenged disease-specific models of care and helped inform strategic planning for primary care reform.

In her leadership roles within the Health Service Executive (HSE), Olga has supported the design, delivery, and evaluation of major national programmes, including the Integrated Care Programme for Chronic Disease, Sláintecare-funded initiatives, and cross-sector collaborations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2022 and 2024, as Senior Research Manager in the HSE’s National Research and Development function, she led the ethics workstream of the National Electronic Research Management System (NERMS) programme. In this role, she supported the operationalisation of the HSE Reference Research Ethics Committees (RECs) and contributed to the development of research governance infrastructure in community health settings. She also co-developed a national training module on ethics and public and patient involvement (PPI) in population health research, in partnership with IPPOSI and the National Research Ethics Committee.

Olga contributed significantly to national policy development during her time with the Institute of Public Health (IPH), where she led and supported evidence synthesis and policy consultation across multiple priority areas. Her work informed national policy decisions on tobacco control, sugar-sweetened drinks taxation, dementia prevention, breastfeeding strategy, and rare diseases. She collaborated with the Department of Health on multiple commissioned reviews, including technical reports that supported the introduction of Ireland’s sugar tax and shaped breastfeeding policy through the development of a five-year strategic plan. 

Olga’s research and policy contributions extend internationally. She co-authored the European Institute of Women’s Health position paper Women and Dementia in Europe, launched at the European Parliament, and has collaborated on EU-wide projects such as CHRODIS and ICARE4EU. As an Evidence Synthesis Ireland Fellow, she contributed to scoping reviews on gender equity in academic health science. These reviews explored both the extent of gender inequity and the effectiveness of organisational and policy-level interventions designed to address it. Published in BMJ Open and BMC Medicine, the findings have informed ongoing discourse around structural barriers in research institutions and contributed to the global evidence base for creating more inclusive and equitable academic environments.

Her academic and professional impact is characterised by a commitment to applied, equity-focused research and capacity-building. Through her teaching, policy engagement, and system-level leadership, Olga continues to support the translation of evidence into meaningful improvements in population health and health system responsiveness.