The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7494 p332
22 March 2008

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Letters to the Editor

Darzi review

Evidence for pharmacy innovation

From Mr T. G. Burnham

I read with interest the comments by Andy Murdock and others quoted in your report of the pharmacy engagement meeting in London (PJ, 8 March 2008, p265). Although prospective studies published in peer-reviewed journals are undoubtedly the gold standard for evaluating proposed innovations in pharmacy services, they may also be gold-plated.

If pharmacy wants to introduce new services, it does not have the benefit of the budget and timescale that the industry has to introduce new drugs. So best use must be made of the evidence we already have. This clearly involves being able to locate properly designed studies in UK conditions where these exist. Where they do not, it will be necessary to weigh up the information that does exist — studies outside the UK, observational studies and practice reports.

Some of these will be published in languages other than English, and may be in journals that are not peer-reviewed, conference proceedings or reports.

The Pharm-line database has been produced under the auspices of UK Medicines Information for some 30 years, and now focuses on recording and indexing literature relevant to pharmacy services, medicines management and prescribing interventions, including conference papers and “grey literature” as far as it is available. It also provides an alerting service to key publications through a listing on its home page and an RSS feed.

The demand for an evidence base for new pharmacy services could well be built on this foundation, supporting an initiative to collect and evaluate relevant material. A number of useful systematic reviews have indeed been published recently, and help to convert information into a form in which it can be used by decision-makers.

However, it seems likely that there are many more reports on novel services which never get beyond their authors’ filing cabinets or computer files, and these, too, should be collected, catalogued, evaluated and disseminated.

Tom Burnham
Pharm-line Database Manager
Pharmacy Department, Guy’s Hospital, London

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