UK Medicines Information
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About UKMi

UK Medicines Information (UKMi) is a coordinated network of medicines advice services across the UK.

Our mission is to promote expert practice in medicines advice for the benefit of patients, the public and professionals through education and communication, and supporting audit, research and innovation.

The network is coordinated and provided with strategic leadership by a national representative body, the UKMi Executive Committee, a forum through which a range of collaborative and co‐operative strategic and operational work is undertaken. Our aim is to facilitate the delivery of the primary objectives of the UKMi Network. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Leading the maintenance and development of professional standards and the UKMi infrastructure to support and develop:
    • the infrastructure and personnel that underpins the UKMi network.
    • key medicines advice skills in the broader pharmacy workforce.
  • Improving patient safety and reducing risks associated with medicines and their use in practice. This encompasses a range of work including supporting the implementation of national medicines safety alerts, adverse drug reaction reporting, the evaluation of risks of medicines in use and the provision of specialist information and advisory services.
  • Advising healthcare professionals to individualise and optimise patient treatment, delivered by a proactive and responsive service.
  • Supporting organisations and networks in their planning and policy work. This includes horizon scanning, support to implement national guidance and also work to support value for money and financial management of the medicines bill.
  • Supporting patients with medicine use. This includes providing (or advising on the provision of) safe and effective patient medicine helplines and other patient facing material.

Accountability

Medicines advice services are commissioned and funded by differing routes in each home nation. Accountability may be built into specific work programmes or partnership agreements. The UKMi executive is not a legal entity in its own right. Each member of the UKMi executive committee is accountable to their individual employer, their commissioner and their constituent networks.

Medicines Advice Services

Medicines advice services in the NHS are provided primarily by pharmacists and pharmacy technicians with clinical expertise and particular skills in locating, assessing, and interpreting information about medicines. The aim of the medicine’s advice service is to facilitate high-quality patient care, through the promotion of the safe, effective and economic use of medicines, by the provision of accurate, timely, appropriate, evidence-based and unbiased information and advice on all aspects relating to the use of medicines.

Provision of Medicines Advice Services

Services differs slightly across the home nations, notably with medicines advice departments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland providing a service to both primary and secondary care healthcare professionals in the area they cover (see contacts for further information). In England, primary care enquiries are answered on a national level, through a network of medicines advice services commissioned by Specialist Pharmacy Services.

UKMi Executive Terms of Reference

See attached

Documents

UKMi ToR