Rate My Professor Ruth Savage

Dr. Ruth Savage is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago, Christchurch, a position she has held since 2009. She earned her MB BS and MSc degrees from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and possesses extensive clinical experience primarily in rural general practice and rheumatology. Beyond academia, she serves as Senior Medical Assessor at the Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring (CARM) in the New Zealand Pharmacovigilance Centre, Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, University of Otago, Dunedin. Additional roles include expert advisor to the New Zealand Medicines Adverse Reactions Committee and consultant to the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring, Uppsala, Sweden, where she conducts research and provides training in international pharmacovigilance.

Ruth Savage's research focuses on pharmacovigilance and rational prescribing, including detection of previously unrecognized adverse drug reactions and interactions in national and international databases, assessment of automated signal detection outputs for clinical relevance, evaluation of risk factors for specific ADRs via case reports, and analysis of prescribing behaviors that enable ADRs or interactions and strategies for modification. She oversees parts of undergraduate general practice teaching modules and delivers postgraduate education to general practitioners and health professionals, stressing adverse drug reaction recognition and harm reduction. Notable publications encompass 'Uncovering pregnancy exposures in pharmacovigilance case report databases: A comprehensive evaluation of the VigiBase pregnancy algorithm' in Drug Safety (2025), alongside conference presentations such as 'Ten serious drug reactions to watch for' at the Goodfellow Symposium (2025) and 'Primary care and pharmacovigilance' at the RNZCGP Conference (2024). She has supervised summer studentships on drug utilization studies, diabetes care access, and smoking cessation interventions. Her contributions bolster medicines safety via primary care pharmacovigilance reporting and global collaborations.