Patients depend on medicines to help maintain health, prevent illness, manage chronic conditions and treat disease. Medicines are an important part of what the NHS does to help patients and are a precious resource.
Prescribing is the most common therapeutic intervention that takes place in the NHS. The NHS spends £11 billion per year on drugs and 85% of this spend takes place in general practice.
NHS Ipswich and East Suffolk Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) are responsible for the prescribing budgets of its member practices and employs its own medicines management team who work closely with the GP practices to support high quality cost effective prescribing.
The CCG has a small Medicines Management team of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who work closely with GPs and local health providers to help get the best out of medicines for local people.
The Medicines Management team uses its experience and knowledge of medicines to ensure that patients within Ipswich and east Suffolk get the medicines they need to effectively manage their condition.
As new medicines are developed and new research is published on existing drugs, medicines are constantly monitored and GPs and patients alerted to any changes.
The Medicines Management Team supports the CCG’s aim to improve the health of the population by optimising the use of medicines through:
The role of the Clinical Oversight Group (COG) is to provide clinical recommendations to the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).
The group has a range of responsibilities that includes receiving, scrutinising and making recommendations on the traffic light status of new drugs or existing medications. The Traffic Light System (TLS) is a colour-coded system that provides recommendation and restriction information on the prescribing of individual drugs in primary and secondary care.
One of the most important roles of the group is to review new drugs coming onto the market or existing drugs that have a new licensed indication, in order to make a clinical recommendation to the CCG on whether clinically the new drug should be supported.
• Local Pharmacies - 'Think Pharmacist' when you need health advice - they are specially trained and there is no need for an appointment!
• Self care leaflets - our Medicines Management team have developed a range of leaflets to give you advice on how best to look after yourself when you have a common illness such as coughs and colds, constipation or indigestion