What the Coroners Know

Every year in England and Wales, coroners write around 450 reports naming actions that could prevent future deaths. Roughly one in five involves a medicine. They are public, they are searchable, and according to our guest, essentially no pharmaceutical company is using them for pharmacovigilance. Dr Georgia Richards is an epidemiologist at King's College London and the founder of the Preventable Deaths Tracker, the first platform to digitise coroners' reports and turn them into live, searchable data. She is Australian, trained at Oxford, and spent a period as a safety epidemiologist at AstraZeneca. In this episode she explains how the coronial system works, what the tracker has found about opioids, fentanyl patches and anaphylaxis, and why she considers this an underutilised safety data source. Content note for show notes: this episode discusses death investigations, including deaths by suicide and overdose, in a research and public health context.