US Trends

HOW MANY PEOPLE IN THE SUTHERLAND SHIRE ARE PRESCRIBED RISPERIDONE?

Short answer

There is no publicly available, official statistic that states exactly how many people in the Sutherland Shire are prescribed risperidone. Prescription data at the level of individual local government areas (LGAs) like Sutherland Shire is not routinely published in Australia for privacy and confidentiality reasons.

Why this number isn’t publicly reported

  • Privacy and small-area data rules : Australian health agencies (e.g., NSW Health, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) generally avoid releasing medication counts for small geographic areas where individuals could potentially be identified.
  • Data is aggregated at higher levels : Antipsychotic and risperidone prescribing is usually reported at:
    • State/territory level (e.g., NSW overall)
    • Primary Health Network (PHN) or Local Health District (LHD) level (e.g., South Eastern Sydney LHD, which includes Sutherland Shire)
    • National level via PBS (Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) statistics
      Not typically broken down to a single LGA like Sutherland Shire.

What is available (and how it relates to Sutherland Shire)

1. Mental health and antipsychotic data for Sutherland Shire LGA

NSW Health’s HealthStats NSW provides mental health indicators for Sutherland Shire LGA, such as:

  • Rates of mental health-related hospitalisations
  • Community mental health service contacts
  • Some broad psychotropic medicine use indicators (often at LHD or PHN level, not drug-specific by LGA)

However, these dashboards do not list a specific “number of people prescribed risperidone” for Sutherland Shire.

2. South Eastern Sydney Local Health District (LHD)

Sutherland Shire sits within the South Eastern Sydney LHD. HealthStats NSW and NSW Health reports sometimes show:

  • Antipsychotic dispensing or prescribing trends for the LHD as a whole
  • But again, not broken down by specific drug (risperidone) and specific LGA in a single public table.

3. National PBS data on risperidone

At the national level, databases like the PBS Statistics and third-party aggregators (e.g., ClinCalc DrugStats) show:

  • Millions of antipsychotic prescriptions per year in Australia/US
  • Risperidone as one of the more commonly prescribed antipsychotics
    But these are national or international totals , not local Shire-level counts.

How someone could estimate (with caveats)

If you needed a rough, speculative sense (not an official figure), you might:

  1. Take the Sutherland Shire population (around 230,000–240,000 people in recent ABS estimates).
  2. Use published antipsychotic use prevalence from Australian studies (often in the range of ~1–2% of adults, varying by age and setting).
  3. Apply an approximate proportion of antipsychotic prescriptions that are risperidone (in some datasets, risperidone is among the top 1–3 antipsychotics, roughly 20–30% of antipsychotic prescriptions in certain cohorts).

Even then, you’d only get a very rough range (e.g., “likely hundreds to low thousands”), and it would be:

  • Based on assumptions
  • Not specific to current Sutherland Shire data
  • Not suitable for official or clinical decision-making

If you need a more precise number

To get something closer to a real figure, you’d typically need:

  • PBS data at small-area level (via an approved research application to Services Australia or the Department of Health)
  • NSW Health pharmaceutical data for the South Eastern Sydney LHD, possibly with a custom report for Sutherland Shire
  • Collaboration with a university or research group that already has access to de-identified, geocoded prescription datasets

These routes involve ethics approval, data-use agreements, and time.

TL;DR

  • Exact number of people in Sutherland Shire prescribed risperidone: not publicly available.
  • Reason: privacy rules and the way health data is aggregated in Australia.
  • Best available public data: mental health and some medicine-use indicators at LHD/PHN or state level, not drug-specific by Shire.
  • Rough expectation: likely hundreds to possibly low thousands , based on national antipsychotic use patterns and the Shire’s population, but this is an estimate only , not an official count.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.