Carmen Wong

Standardisation of the FAERS database: a systematic approach to manually recoding drug name variants†

The US Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), one of the worlds largest spontaneous reporting systems, is difficult to use because of report duplication and a lack of standardisation in the recording of drug names. Unresolved data quality issues may distort statistical analyses, rendering the results difficult to interpret when detecting and monitoring adverse effects of pharmaceutical products. The aim of this study was to develop and implement a data cleaning protocol to identify and resolve drug nomenclature issues. The key ‘data treatment’ plan involved standardising drug names held in the FAERS database.

Estimating non-billable time in Australian general practice

Objectives: To quantify the time that general practitioners spend on patient care that is not claimable from Medicare (non‐billable) and the monetary value of this work were it claimable, and to identify variables independently associated with non‐billable time.

Assessing patients' and GPs' ability to recognise overweight and obesity

Objective: To assess the ability of GPs and patients to recognise overweight and obesity, determine factors associated with accurate weight perception, and identify methods used by patients and GPs to manage patient overweight and obesity.