Using linked health data to use medicines better

In England we spend £20 billion on medicines. However, it is not known if medicines are used as intended or if they have the effects that are intended. This is because medicines data are not routinely linked to health outcomes data. However, this is now becoming possible through nationally linked data sets. We have recently been able to use data from across England, Scotland and Wales to begin to understand some of these problems. One example was published earlier this year in Nature Medicine: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02158-7

We are now extending some of these analyses to understand how medicines are used in society and how linked electronic health records may be able to enable us to reduce unwanted use of medicines, guide where medicines are not used as intended all with the aim of making policy impacts and improving medicines use in the NHS. We will be working with partners from the NHS and other arm’s length bodies where applicable.

We are open to applications from people with strong computer sciences/ data sciences and statistical skills. Graduates from programmes including maths, physics, computer sciences and related disciplines all welcome as well as epidemiology, statistics, and related life sciences disciplines of pharmacology or other biological sciences.