Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency

Although SPCs and PILs are made available for most branded prescription products through the electronic Medicines Compendium, there is currently no way patients and healthcare providers can access information on other medicines. This includes the generic prescriptions products that are supplied to the majority of patients and most over-the-counter products.

Susan Frade, MHRA

We have just tested the electronic medicines compendium, and we seemed to be able to get over the counter drugs up and lots of different brands too. For example we tried clotrimazole (Canesten) Ranitidine and some allergy medicines. They all seemed to come up

The need is for a comprehensive and up-to-dated database. The current online databses do not have both of these qualities. Good so see the MHRA taking a lead on this - it had to be a non commercial organisation.

As a pharmacist I agree that acess to SPC's online via the EMC is a really useful resource and this or a similar site that could provide access to more SPCs would be even better.

EMC *used* to be great. Sadly, the site was redesigned a while ago, and is now (technically speaking) awful. It is also awful from an accessibility perspective. In fact, I now can no longer say much in favour of it.

Try printing out the PIL for Florinef, for example.

Normally, I would be against the MHRA doing this. It is yet more expense, and MHRA fees are high enough, already! Having said that, I don't think there is an awful lot of alternative.

Please, as both a pharmacist and web-site designer with an interest in disabled accessibility, design your site well... Don't waste the opportunity, and don't forget all the different types of users you serve. http://www.nhs.uk has also been redesigned in the last few years, and I now find it useless for most work-related functions...

I too use emc on a regular basis, and to date have not encountered any problems. I agree, if it is possible to require all companies with licensed products to make their SPCs and PILs available on this website it would avoid duplication and it would mean all the information is available on one website.

The internet has introduced huge opportunities for consumers and patients to access a lot of information on different medicines. Unfortunately a lot of this information is unvalidated / unvalidatable and can be misleading. Having information available from the regulatory agency itself assures that the right information is available to the general public. emc is not widely known outside the healthcare industry. It also doesn't include all of the generic products that are currently approved.
I strongly support having a single database as long as it is maintained properly and the PILs are added within a short time of the MA being granted.
Any consideration of the costs involved is, in my view, short-sighted, since the over-riding aim has to be to make the right information available to help the public use their medication safely, whether they have bought it themselves or had it prescribed.

We also support having a single database which is easily accessible to all. The EMC website is already available and offers a high quality and reliable portal for product informations. In our view, we should not be duplicating this effort onto a separate source, but rather optimize the use of what is already available through Datapharm