Medicines Information Centre

Medicines Information Service at Royal Derby Hospital supports the safe, effective and efficient use of medicines by providing evidence-based information and advice on their therapeutic use.

We provide an enquiry answering service on all aspects of drug therapy.
 

Who provides the service?

The Medicines Information Centre is based at Royal Derby Hospital, and is staffed by an experienced clinical pharmacist and supervised rotational clinical and pre-registration pharmacists with access to a wide range of reference texts, databases and primary literature. We can also call on advice from specialist centres at national level for areas such as drugs in pregnancy, toxicology etc.
 

Who can use the service?

We take calls from doctors, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, radiographers and other healthcare professionals working within UHDB regarding all medicines-related issues. These may include queries involving dosing and administration, adverse effects, interactions, use in pregnancy and breast feeding, and many others. While queries relating to inpatient care usually go first to ward-based clinical pharmacists, complex queries are passed to Medicines Information. We also take queries from professionals in primary care, such as GPs and community pharmacists, and from patients and their carers. 

Professionals in primary care can also contact the national Specialist Pharmacy Service (SPS) network (nearest regional centre is at Leicester Royal Infirmary) on asksps.nhs@sps.direct or 0300 770 8564.

SPS do not take queries from patients - if you are a patient please contact us, if it is regarding medication from your GP or community pharmacy, please try to contact them first as they will have your relevant history and background information.

We also provide support to our clinical pharmacy service, as well as the Trust’s Drugs and Therapeutics Group, for whom we may provide reviews / assessments of new products or horizon scanning for new medicines.

Contact us - healthcare professionals

Telephone: 01332 785 379

Email: uhdb.medicinesinformation@nhs.net

The service is available from 9am - 5pm Monday to Friday.

Please note that while emails between nhs.net accounts are classed as secure for confidential/patient data, emails from other domains will not be and so should not include sensitive information

Medicines information staff also have patient-facing clinical commitments and so may be out of the office when you call. For professional queries please leave a voicemail message or email.

For urgent advice out of hours or at weekends / bank holidays, please contact your site's on-call or out-of-hours pharmacist.

Contact us - patient helpline

Patient helpline: 01332 787 980


Medicines information staff also have patient-facing clinical commitments and so may be out of the office when you call. Please try again later or, if still no response, please contact the relevant pharmacy dispensary for your hospital:
 

For urgent advice out of hours or at weekends / bank holidays, please contact your site's on-call or out-of-hours pharmacist.