New Medicines Reviews 2013

2 Methodology

Letters from our Chief Pharmacist were sent to the NHS boards, informing them of the repeat data collection exercise and including each NHS board's specific feedback from the first data collection exercise.

A list of medicines 'accepted' or 'accepted for restricted use' by SMC from April to September 2012 was compiled, totalling 23 medicines (detailed in Appendix 1).This was the SMC advice issued during the first 5 months following the CMO guidance.

This list of medications was distributed to each of the 14 NHS boards, through their formulary pharmacist and/or director of pharmacy, with a request to report on the following;

1. the decision taken by each NHS board's area drug and therapeutic committee (ADTC),
2. the date of the decision (the date must be within 90 days of the SMC advice to the NHS boards), and
3. the date this decision was published on the NHS board's website (the date must be within 14 days of the NHS board decision).

Simultaneously, we tried to source the above information from individual NHS boards' websites to determine accessibility of that information to patients and the public. A list of search terms (detailed in Appendix 2) was used to interrogate the websites.

Once the above data had been collated, individual feedback reports were then sent to each of the 14 NHS boards, requesting them to validate their submitted data by return.