Lecture details

The first of the modern medicines were marketed in the early twentieth century, when people used medicines occasionally and for short periods of time. Just as medicines have developed since then, our use of medicines has also changed.

People are now living longer, living with more diseases and taking more medicines. People use medicines for prevention of diseases as well as treatment and multiple medicine use is now very common.

While in the majority of cases, this benefits health care, the risk of medication-related problems, adverse events and poor treatment outcomes also increases.

Join Professor Roughead for this Knowledge Works lecture as she highlights the challenges of maintaining medication safety in a health system evolving to support people with multiple chronic conditions.

Professor Libby Roughead is a Research Professor at the Sansom Institute for Health Research, at the University of South Australia and is Director of the Quality Use of Medicines and Pharmacy Research Centre. Her research focuses on understanding problems with medicines use, identifying the extent of harm and benefit from medicines, evaluating interventions to improve medicine use and evaluating improvements in health care.

She is also the leader of the Centre of Research Excellence in Post-Marketing Surveillance of Medicines and Medical Devices, where she directs research to detect problems associated with medicines and medical devices. Additionally, Professor Roughead leads the Veterans' Medicines Advice and Therapeutics Education Services (MATES) program which provides educational material to doctors, pharmacists and veterans and has covered 35 individual topics. Veterans' MATES has improved medicine use and reduced hospitalisations.

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