The Medicine Guides Roadmap provides information about the development of the Medicine Guides website.
In February 2008, a key milestone in the development of Medicine Guides was reached. The
Medicine Guides website now contains a Medicine Guide for every medicine that can be prescribed
in the UK, and for which Datapharm, the publisher of the website, has received information about
from the pharmaceutical company.* There are almost 2,500 Medicine Guides available from the website.
Now that the website is 'comprehensive' – containing a Medicine Guide for all medicines in all
conditions published to a common standard – the publishing phase is complete. The next step is to further
develop the resource. We will be enhancing the website based on what we've heard from our users
and other stakeholders.
In 2008 we will be:
- Improving the search function of the site
- Working with pharmaceutical companies to ensure more support materials are available to help patients
in their medicine taking. These will be available from the Additional Information pages within specific
Guides (e.g. videos on how a medicine works or should be taken)
-
See http://medguides.medicines.org.uk/demonstrations.aspx and http://medguides.medicines.org.uk/diabetesdevices.aspx for examples
- Adding more web links to sources of useful information. This includes an increased number of links to and from the NHS Direct website and patient organisations
- Working to ensure that Medicine Guides remain the patient-facing medicines information resource for the NHS through NHS Direct and the new NHS Choices website
The Roadmap below can be ordered alphabetically by therapy area, or by publishing date.
Clicking on 'Therapy area' or 'Date' in the table below will determine the order.
In the table below, click on a therapy area and a list of related conditions for which Medicine Guides have been written will be displayed.
*Datapharm publishes the electronic Medicines Compendium (eMC). This contains Summaries of Product Characteristics (SPCs)
which are used by doctors, pharmacists and nurses to help them prescribe and use medicines correctly and safely. It also
contains Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) which are written for patients and are included in the pack with a medicine.
Medicine Guides are created from the SPCs on the eMC. All the information on the eMC website comes directly from
pharmaceutical companies www.emc.medicines.org.uk.