Dr Pauline Norris and Dr Simon Horsburgh
University of Otago School of Pharmacy researchers Dr Pauline Norris and Dr Simon Horsburgh have been able to secure a year's worth of prescribing data for the Gisborne/East Cape area, giving them records of 654,000 prescriptions.
"Prescription medicine is obviously important to people and can improve people's health, but we don't know much about which people get which medicines, or how much they are paying for their prescriptions," says Norris.
"We know about GP services and there is good research being carried out on unequal access to surgical services, but there is not much known about prescription medicines - in particular, how they are distributed in terms of gender, age, socio-economic status and ethnicity."
Norris says this means they have no answers to questions like, do Mäori take more asthma medication than Päkehä, or do older people take more statins than younger people?
"A lot is known about the epidemiology of diseases and risk factors, but prescribing is one area of variability that can affect outcomes and we just don't know about it," says Norris.
Horsburgh says to get those answers they will link the prescribing information to patient information so that they know things like age, gender and ethnicity, allowing them look at patterns of prescribing.
"It may sound like a very trivial task, but it's a mammoth one," he says.
"Gisborne was chosen because it is isolated and it was most likely that people from the city and surrounding region would get their prescriptions filled by one of Gisborne's eight community pharmacies, or at the hospital pharmacy."
Norris says the research also wouldn't be possible without the exceptional support they have received from Ngäti Porou Hauora.
Key collaborators: Peter Herbison, University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine; Peter Crampton, University of Otago, Wellington; Bruce Arroll, University of Auckland; Jackie Cumming, Victoria University; Gordon Becket, University of Central Lancashire.
FUNDING
Health Research Council