Medicines Complete
Access to Medicines Complete was agreed with the Scottish Government in 2006, the resource supports community pharmacy contractors to have to up-to-date reference texts to support clinical practice.

Contractors are able to access the resource from the SHOW community pharmacy website. Once on the website contractors should click the link Medicines Complete on the navigation bar on the left hand side of the front page. The link will only work from your pharmacy premises.

Circular PCA (P) 2009 5 confirms ongoing access to the resource for contractors until January 2010.

The following texts are available to all contractors who are able to access Medicines Complete.

British National Formulary (BNF)
The BNF is published jointly by the BMJ Group and RPS Publishing

The text is compiled with the advice of clinical experts; the British National Formulary (BNF) provides up-to-date guidance on prescribing, dispensing and administering medicines.

The BNF details medicines prescribed in the UK, with special reference to their uses, cautions, contra-indications, side-effects, dosage and relative costs.

Updated every six months, the BNF reflects current best practice as well as legal and professional guidelines relating to the use of medicines. It is intended for use by prescribers, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.

British National Formulary for Children (BNFC)
The BNFC is published jointly by the British Medical Association, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group.

BNFC provides essential practical information to all involved in the prescribing, dispensing, monitoring, and administration of medicines to children. It encourages the safe, effective, and appropriate use of medicines for the management of childhood conditions.

Information in BNFC has been validated against emerging evidence, best practice guidelines, and advice from a network of clinical experts. The text is published under the authority of a Paediatric Formulary Committee.

As many medicines are not licensed for use in children, BNFC includes authoritative advice on licensed as well as unlicensed and "off-label" use of medicines for children from birth up to the age of 18 years.

Martindale: The complete drug referenceMartindale: The complete drug reference has been a trusted source for medicines information for over 120 years. With its worldwide coverage and unbiased, reliable and evaluated information on drugs and medicines, Martindale forms the backbone of Medicines Complete.

• Encyclopaedic facts about drugs and medicines
• Over 6,300 drug monographs
• 149,000 preparations
• 40,700 references
• 14,700 manufacturers
• Synopses of treatments for more than 660 diseases
• Enables identification of medicines, the local equivalent and the manufacturer
• Includes herbals, diagnostic agents, radiopharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical excipients, toxins, and poisons as well as drugs and medicines
• Based on published information and extensively referenced

Martindale combines sections of evaluated text summarising relevant information for both licensed and unlicensed uses with referenced abstracts or reviews that expand upon the details given in the text or add additional information, if appropriate. The Martindale editorial team uses extensive literature surveillance and modern information retrieval techniques to review existing text and identify new areas of interest for inclusion. Given the increasing importance of evidence-based medicine, particular care is taken to identify, and where possible include as references, systematic reviews and meta-analyses or evidence-based guidelines.

Stockley's Drug Interactions
Stockley's Drug Interactions provides quick and easy access to clinically relevant, evaluated, and evidence-based information on interactions between therapeutic drugs, proprietary medicines, herbal medicines, foods, drinks, pesticides and drugs of abuse.

Interactions monographs are assembled alphabetically into 34 sections, grouped by therapeutic use or pharmacological activity.

• Over 17,000 drug interactions in around 3,100 monographs
• Fully referenced
• Designed for quick and easy access
• Covers therapeutic drugs, proprietary medicines, herbal medicines, foods, drinks, pesticides and drugs of abuse

Stockley's Interaction Alerts
Stockley's Interaction Alerts is based on the full text of Stockley's Drug Interactions. The wealth of information has been reduced into succinct two-part messages to provide a brief overview of the evidence behind the interaction and helpful guidance on how it can be managed in practice.

• Allows instant review of possible drug interactions
• Covers over 40,000 drug–drug, drug–alcohol or drug–food pairs
• Rating system easily identifies the depth of background information and gauges the potential severity of each interaction

Herbal Medicines
The use of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) has increased rapidly over recent years.

Herbal Medicines addresses the issues of quality, safety and efficacy by providing scientifically rigorous, impartial, evidence-based information on medicinal herbs.

• 152 structured monographs detailing phytochemical, pharmacological and clinical aspects of herbal medicines
• Enables you to advise on the rational and safe use of herbal medicines
• ·Presents various appendices that group herbs with specific actions, and highlights potential interactions with conventional medicine

Dietary Supplements
This edition of Dietary Supplements has been completely revised and updated to include the latest findings on the most commonly used dietary supplements. Dietary Supplements includes:

• Over 100 comprehensively referenced monographs
• Regulations relating to dietary supplements in UK, Europe and the USA
• Useful appendices including a summary of interactions with conventional medicines