The CAMOMILE seed programme

The Complementary/Alternative Medicines Outcomes Monitoring: Intensive Longitudinal Evaluation (CAMOMILE) Programme.

Traditional and complementary/alternative medicines (TCAMs) – also known as ‘natural health’ products – are a popular healthcare choice among patients in New Zealand and worldwide. Broadly, TCAMs includes various types of products, including herbal medicines, ‘dietary supplements’, and probiotics, as well as ‘traditional medicines’, such as preparations used in Rongoa Māori and traditional Chinese medicines. TCAMs are available from many sources, including community pharmacies, health-food stores, supermarkets, online stores, and TCAM practitioners, such as naturopaths, herbalists and traditional healers/practitioners. Patients’ TCAMs use is often undocumented on patients’ electronic health records. This is quite different to the situation for prescription medicines: patients’ use of prescription medicines is routinely collected and stored in national electronic health records (or national datasets). For prescription medicines, this routine collection of data enables researchers to examine associations between use of prescription medicines and patients’ health outcomes. As many people use TCAMs, routinely collecting data on their use potentially will allow researchers also to explore associations between the use of TCAMs and health outcomes.

This programme of work takes the first steps towards routine data collection for TCAMs. The work explores issues relating to the feasibility of routine data collection for TCAMs, the classification of TCAMs exposures and outcomes, the use of patient-centred outcome measures, and the potential to link TCAMs data with existing national datasets.