About

Introduction

Dr Jane Robertson is course co-ordinator and senior lecturer for the postgraduate pharmaco-epidemiology program within the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Newcastle. In addition, she is Director of the Newcastle Evaluation Group, responsible for supervision of a group of external evaluators for submissions to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee for listing of medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Dr Robertson has long standing research interests in patterns of usage of prescription medicines and influences on prescribing choices. Currently she is undertaking research into issues of cost of health care on decision making and use of electronic decision support and drug information to support prescribing decisions. Projects undertaken have involved both qualitative and quantitative methods utilising focus groups, semi-structured interviews, postal surveys and collecting and interpreting prescribing data. Dr Robertson has a particular interest in the use of large datasets to better understand how drugs are used and was involved in extensive of analyses of PBS datasets as part of her PhD research. She has published on the limitations of using such data in isolation – effective data linkage to other important datasets is key to meaningful interpretation and analysis of prescription data. She is particularly interested in the development of methods to use linked data to monitor drug safety.

Dr Robertson is a member of the Prescribing Intervention Working Group of the National Prescribing Service and Chair of the Pharmacy Review Group. She is the University of Newcastle representative on the Management Committee of the NSW CHeReL data linkage project and a Technical Advisor to the Secretariat for the Expert Consultation on Essential Medicines for Children, World Health Organization, Geneva. Work with the WHO has led to a number of projects examining availability and cost of medicines for children in Africa and elsewhere.

Other

Publications