Medicines and medical devices provide important health benefits, but they also carry risks of adverse events.
Many potential adverse effects have not yet been identified when products are first licenced for use, so it is essential that we have some means of investigating the safety of medicines and medical devices once they start to be used in the general population.
It is also important to know whether there is equitable access to medicines and devices, and whether they are being used appropriately.
In New Zealand we are fortunate to have high-quality national collections of routinely collected demographic, health, and pharmaceutical dispensing data, and we use these data to undertake large population-based studies of the safety and use of medicines and medical devices.