For the last 33 years the Regional Drug and Therapeutics Centre has been analysing prescribing data in the North of England.
The North of England has some of the highest levels of deprivation in the country with over 50% of households facing deprivation challenges. Weighting prescribing data by deprivation allows researchers to explore the relationship between socioeconomic factors and prescribing patterns. It helps determine if certain areas with higher deprivation have different prescribing needs or if there are disparities in access to medication.
During this session we will describe the challenges in analysing prescribing data without better weightings to capture the impact of deprivation, and the steps we are taking to overcome this.

• To better understand the use of deprivation metrics in analysing prescribing data