Comparability
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Personal Finances and Welfare, Social StatisticsJonas Kirchheiner-Rasmussen
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Several comparable national and international statistics exist about the consumption of medicines. There are several factors that can influence the sales of prescription medicine. Regulations of witch medicines that require prescription and the amount of subsidies offered by the authorities, can vary from country to country and over time. Therefore it is important to be observant of these factors, if the statistics is used to evaluate the consumption of medicine over time or to compare consumption from country to country.
Comparability - geographical
Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland, all have registers of the purchases of prescription medicine. A Swedish statistic of sales of prescription medicine, is available via the Swedish The social welfare agency.
Comparability over time
Several factors influence trends in medicine sales over time. Dispensing rules for medicines may change, or reimbursement/subsidy status may be adjusted, which can affect how much of a medicine is sold on prescription versus over the counter over time. In addition, practices may have changed regarding whether prescription medicines are supplied to users through a hospital/institution/drug treatment centre or similar (i.e., non–person-identifiable sales), or whether users obtain the medicine themselves at a pharmacy (i.e., person-identifiable sales).
Coherence - cross domain
The Danish Health Data Authority have several statistics, based on data from The Register of Pharmaceutical Sales. The Danish Health Data Authority have several statistics about medicine aimed at the treatment of certain diseases and the consumption of medicines in certain population groups.
Coherence - internal
To the extent possible, consistency is checked between the figures in the StatBank tables for “Purchases of prescription medicines” and the StatBank tables for the registers used to produce the figures for “Purchases of prescription medicines”. For example, it is checked that the population figures used to calculate prescriptions per 100 inhabitants are consistent with the figures in FOLK1A. As pseudonymisation of the different registers takes place at different points in time, there may be very minor inconsistencies with regard to sex and age.