Dr YVONNE GREENSTREET, medical director, GlaxoSmithKline, replies:

The medical information department at GlaxoSmithKline is committed to providing the most up-to-date scientific and clinical information to support the appropriate use of our medicines and I would like to apologise if on any occasion our service has not met the expectations of our customers.

Our team of medical information advisers are customer-focused professionals, most of whom are pharmacists who have worked in medicines information within the National Health Service. They undergo a high level of ongoing training and work closely with other scientific and medical colleagues to ensure that they are familiar with new information on our medicines as soon as it becomes available.

The department has access to a large number of external and internal clinical resources to ensure that the information we provide is as comprehensive as possible. Each enquiry is dealt with on an individual basis.

We routinely monitor the quality of our service and in a customer satisfaction survey carried out last year over 97 per cent of respondents rated the GSK medical information service as good or excellent.

In the majority of cases we have all the relevant information to address a particular medical enquiry and are able to provide a definitive and specific response. However, it is important to note that occasionally there are clinical situations where we do not have specific information because no published or internal data are available.

In these circumstances we provide as much clinical information as possible to assist our customers in making an informed clinical decision, but I recognise that a complete answer does not always exist.