Richard Turner (MBBS, BMedSc, FRACS, PhD, Grad Dip Data Science) is a Specialist General Surgeon at the Royal Hobart Hospital and Professor of Surgery with the University of Tasmania. He has been managing patients with acute and chronic pancreatitis for over 30 years. His PhD thesis from James Cook University, titled “Clinicopathological characteristics of pancreatitis in Northern Queensland”, made a case for managing the spectrum of pancreatitis from within a chronic disease framework. Such experience subsequently informed a hospital-based data linkage project in Tasmania, which has yielded an extensive dataset with the capacity to answer multiple research questions related to the epidemiology and health resource costs of pancreatitis in an Australian jurisdiction. This represents the first stage of a more ambitious project, overseen by the ANZ Alliance for Pancreas Research, to quantify the disease burden of pancreatitis in Australia one state and territory at a time.