Speaker: Professor Rod Jackson, School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Date: 27 August, 2013 (Tuesday)

Venue: Seminar Room 5, LG1/F, Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building, 21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Abstract:

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are common, readily preventable chronic diseases and there are major disparities between population groups.  About 10-15% of adults in countries like New Zealand and Australia probably account for over half the premature CVD events, but we are currently unable to identify them accurately to target preventive treatment effectively.  Moreover available treatments can halve CVD risk but there are significant treatment disparities including under- and over-treatment.  The VIEW programme is designed: i) develop better risk prediction tools to identify these high-risk patients; ii) quantify and map gaps and disparities in appropriate treatment; iii) model the impact of treatment disparities on CVD burden.  To achieve this we are linking encrypted personal data on over two million New Zealanders from routine national health databases and from web-based decision support systems.  The decision support systems are currently used by several thousand GPs to help them manage CVD risk and a secondary care version is being rolled out to coronary care units across the country to support quality improvement activities and research.

This presentation will cover the mid-term results of this long-term research programme including: new risk prediction tools in primary and secondary prevention; the magnitude of disparities in CVD risk burden by ethnicity and socioeconomic status; and levels of preventive medication use post ACS using maps and other figures.

Providing accurate risk prediction algorithms, interactive atlases of treatment disparities, and evidence of the impact of disparities, will be directly relevant to practice and policy.

Bio-sketch:

Professor Jackson teaches clinical and public health epidemiology to undergraduate and postgraduate students and to health professionals.

He has 30 years of research experience in CVD epidemiology.  He is one of the architects of New Zealand risk-based clinical guidelines for managing CVD risk.  For the past 15 years his research has been based around using web-based decision support tools linked to regional and national electronic health databases to implement, monitor and improve CVD risk assessment and management guidelines.  He has published approximately 250 papers.