Round Table 2 Lecture 2: MEDICINES INFORMATION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

David Erskine. Director: London & South East Medicines Information Service

Background
There are around 220 medicines information centres based in hospitals in the United Kingdom. We collaborate at a regional level to achieve consistency in training materials, enquiry answering procedures, and access to information resources. The Regional Directors meet regularly to provide strategic direction in areas like IT developments, procurement of resources, and reducing duplication of effort.
Medicine information pharmacists mainly answer clinical enquiries from other healthcare professionals (both those providing services and those commissioning them). In total around 250,000 enquiries are answered every year. We also train around 1500 pharmacists every year in the skills needed to identify, interpret and communicate information about medicines.

Internet sites
We publish all our policies, training materials and support information on our website. (www.ukmi.nhs.uk). This site is intended to be used mainly by pharmacists who work in medicine information centres.
Over the last 10 years we have also created a large and very busy website called the National Electronic Library of Medicines (www.nelm.nhs.uk). This website enables anyone to access the information and advice we generate about medicines and now has over 12,000 subscribers (mainly healthcare professionals). Every year over 30 million records are downloaded from the site.
We present different types of information about medicines on the site and then link it using coding, so that for each medicine you can find the latest news, national guidelines, good quality reviews, safety information, and changes in product licence and monitoring advice. We collaborate with other centres across the country to compile this information and every day a pharmacist scans around 20 resources to identify new information, summarise it, categorise it and publish it on the site. A daily email is sent out to our registered users highlighting the new information on the website that day and users can elect to receive all the updates for that day or only ones which reflect their particular interests (e.g. oncology).
We have recently added a few communities to our site, so for example pharmacists that work in prisons can share material and communicate more easily with each other using the community section of the website. We also now support hospitals that want to post their formularies on the site so that local doctors and pharmacists can find out what medicines are used by their local specialists.

Finally we also now include literature about medicines management so that users can not only obtain evidence about the medicines themselves but also evidence about the service support needed to ensure that they are used safely, effectively and cost effectively.
By focusing our resources on proactive publication of information on this website we feel that we can maximise the impact of the work we do by influencing a much larger audience than we would otherwise be able to communicate with on a one-to-one basis.