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Article History

Received: 19 August 2025

Accepted: 3 March 2026

First Online: 21 March 2026

Declarations

:

: The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

: This research study was conducted retrospectively from data obtained for clinical purposes. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the Clinical Research Ethics Committee of University College Cork (ECM 4 (u) 20/06/2023 and ECM 3 (dd) 22/10/2024).

: The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from the Health Service Executive Primary Care Reimbursement Service (HSE-PCRS).

: The R scripts used to conduct the analyses in this study were applied to anonymised patient-level data generated by the data controller and include pre-processing steps specific to the supplied extract. As the underlying dataset cannot be shared and the pre-processing cannot be replicated externally, the scripts cannot be shared publicly in a meaningful way. Analytical code is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

: Not applicable.

: Not applicable.

: All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data cleaning and analysis were performed by Steven Gilmore and Dr Ann Sinéad Doherty. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Steven Gilmore, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.