Dr Ruth Savage

Ruth has been Senior Lecturer in the Department of General Practice since 2009. She undertakes research in adverse drug reaction monitoring (pharmacovigilance) and rational prescribing and has experience in pharmacoepidemiology studies.

Ruth is responsible for part of the undergraduate general practice teaching modules and is also involved in postgraduate teaching to general practitioners and other health professionals where she emphasises the need to recognize adverse drug reactions and strategies to avoid them or minimise the harm they may cause. The relevance of her teaching and research to clinical practice is in large part due to her extensive clinical experience primarily in rural general practice and also rheumatology.

Ruth is also Senior Medical Assessor in the Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring (CARM), New Zealand Pharmacovigilance Centre, Dept of Preventive and Social Medicine, University of Otago, Dunedin where a high proportion of the suspected adverse reaction reports submitted by health professionals are from primary care. She is also an expert advisor to the New Zealand Medicines Adverse Reactions Committee.

As a consultant to the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring, Uppsala, Sweden Ruth also undertakes research and provides training in international pharmacovigilance.

Research Interests

• Pharmacovigilance and Rational Prescribing
• Detection of previously unrecognized adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and interactions in national and international databases of ADR reports.
• Assessing if the outputs from automated methods of detecting suspected adverse reactions from large databases are clinically relevant.
• Assessment of ADR case reports to determine risk factors for individual ADRs.
• Assessment of ADR case reports to determine if prescribing behaviour has allowed specific ADRs or interactions to occur and how this can be modified.

Summer Student Supervision