The Health Research Board (HRB) is planning to develop online drug prevalence interactive tables next month to provide “a real-time, precise and succinct picture of the drug situation in Ireland”.
Over the past two years the National Documentation Centre on Drug Use (NDC), which launched its new website in 2009, has developed two dataset query systems — one for National Drug Treatment Reporting System (NDTRS) data and the other for National Drug-related Deaths Index (NDRDI) data, with the aim of creating a repository for Irish drugs and alcohol research.
NDTRS is an epidemiological database on treated drug and alcohol misuse and the NDRDI is a census of alcohol-related and drug-related deaths (such as those due to accidental or intentional overdose) and deaths among drug users (such as those due to hepatitis C and HIV).
The HRB is now planning to build on the success of these systems and create a new data query system, which will enable stakeholders to access and use drug and alcohol prevalence data.
“We also wish to develop a series of dynamic drug situation report pages,” the HRB said. Using data pertaining to the key epidemiological indicators of prevalence, treatment data and drug-related deaths, the NDC will present aggregated data from all of these datasets on one web page.
“The result will be that visitors to this page can, in moments, see the most up-to-date data on the use of a particular drug, the numbers in treatment for that drug, deaths associated with using it and drug seizure data,” the HRB said.
“We will have a series of pages separated by drug type, age spans, regions or other groupings, which are compatible with our data management protocols. These pages will be automatically updated as the datasets feeding them are updated.”
Source: Lloyd Mudiwa, Irish Medical Times, 23/11/2012
Safer Student Nights
eBulletin
Poll
