Associate Professor Syed Tabish R. Zaidi

Profile

Dr Syed Tabish R. Zaidi is an experienced clinical pharmacist and academic with formal postgraduate qualifications in clinical pharmacy and an established track record in translational research relevant to antimicrobial stewardship and renal medicine. Dr Zaidi has mentored several interns and early career pharmacists in his previous and current appointments and takes pride in being part of their rewarding professional journeys. Dr Zaidi is experienced in traditional, web-based, and hospital-based teaching to the undergraduate and postgraduate pharmacy, nursing and medicine students. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications including a first of its kind reference text on Drug Dosing in Obesity and has secured various competitive research grants. Dr Zaidi has successfully supervised 3 PhDs to completion and currently supervising 4 PhD students. His research has informed policy decisions on antimicrobial use in Tasmanian public hospitals thus improving patient outcomes and infectious related morbidity. Dr Zaidi has also studied barriers to medication adherence in haemodialysis patients and have challenged the current status quo where medication adherence is not routinely measured in clinical practice. 

Dr Zaidi joined School of Healthcare at the University of Leeds as an Associate Professor in Pharmacy Practice. Currently, he is involved in the development of patient-led interventions to optimise medicine safety in community settings, improving healthcare professional communication with patients during technology transformation in hospital settings, and, enhancing parents and career understanding of medication use in pediatric patients. Dr Zaidi is the module lead for the Service Development in Healthcare module and teaches in Independent and Supplementary Prescribing and Applied Pharmacology for Nursing.  

Responsibilities

• Module leader for Service Development in Healthcare (HECS5141 M)

Research interests

Dr Zaidi's research aims to study, develop, and implement solutions that optimise medication use by healthcare professionals and patients. Within this premise, Dr Zaidi's research is focused on facilitating the training of healthcare professionals in the area of antimicrobial stewardship, identifying solutions to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics in the community, enabling patients to identify safety concerns related to medication use in a timely manner to avoid preventable harm, and addressing sub-optimal dosing of medicines in obese patient population. More specifically, Dr Zaidi is leading the development of a safe medicines alert tool that will enable patients to identify and manage medication-related adverse effects in a timely manner. Preventable adverse drug events are a significant source of patient mortality and morbidity and developing a safe medicines alert tool may potentially prevent adverse drug reactions. Dr Zaidi is also leading an international study looking at the availability and uptake of antimicrobial stewardship training opportunities for healthcare professionals. This research will not only develop an international inventory of antimicrobial stewardship training programs but also document the content, quality and outcome of such programs. An increasing prevalence of obesity is creating unique challenges for healthcare professionals in many aspects of patient care. One of these aspects of patient care is medication dosing in obese patients. Existing posologic information of medicines provides no guidance on how to dose medicines in morbidly obese individuals. Dr Zaidi has edited a reference book on this subject matter covering antibiotic dosing in obese patients and currently investigating the dosing of various peri-operative medicines in order to draw recommendations for clinical practice. His future research plan in this area includes studying dosing of narrow therapeutic index medicines such as anticoagulants, chemotherapy and opiates in obese patients.

Qualifications

• PhD (Monash)
• M.ClinPharm (USM)
• B.Pharm (Karachi)

Professional memberships

• European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases

Student education

Dr Zaidi is teaching health economics, deprescribing, and implementation science subjects at the postgraduate pharmacy coursework. Additionally, Dr Zaidi is providing supervision for candidates under the National Institute of Health Research fellowship scheme to develop their subsequent application for doctoral programs. He also teaches pharmacology to the undergraduate nursing students.  

Research groups and institutes

• Medicines optimisation