Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency

I believe making the authoritative MHRA information about medicines publicly available is a great and helpful idea – but do we need to reinvent the wheel in these times of financial cutbacks?

Let me explain.

At Patient UK ( www.patient.co.uk ), we have around one million visitors a week and also run health forums. Approximately half the forum traffic is to do with problems people are having with drugs they have been prescribed. So, I absolutely agree it is a great idea to make authoritative information about medicines publicly available to help people better understand medications they or their family members are on.

However, I wonder whether the costs of setting up, publicising and maintaining a new website are what’s needed in these times of pressure on the public purse. The DoH now runs a scheme called the Information Standard that accredits high quality health sites and the content they display. I am sure many of the already popular sites accredited under the scheme would host the MHRA information in a reliable way at little or no cost.

I can only speak for Patient UK (an IS accredited site), but we would certainly host the information and index it so our visitors could find it easily on searches or when using forums. We could also make it available for GPs to use in surgery when seeing patients. This would get the information maximum exposure at little public cost.

The MHRA information would sit easily alongside information about drugs and conditions our pharmacists and GP authors produce for Patient UK eg this search for information about the drug Betim …

http://www.patient.co.uk/DisplayConcepts.asp?WordId=betim&MaxResults=50

I hope this helps.

Gordon

To get maximum exposure of the MHRA content at minimal public cost