The National Prescribing Service (NPS) has an exciting new service available for general practitioners, pharmacists and other health professionals.
RADAR (rational assessment of drugs and research) is an online service that will provide independent information on new medicines, revised PBS listings and newly published research relevant to primary care.

As this is an on-line service, NPS is able to have this information available and on the web site in a timely manner to assist health professionals.
There will be quarterly updates available from the website, www.npsradar.org.au ,and you can register to receive these by email.

One of the more frustrating parts of a community pharmacists' day is to be confronted by consumers wanting information on the latest and greatest break through that they saw, heard or read in the media. With the advent of easy internet access this frustration has become worse as consumers search fro information on their disease state and medication.

NPS has many programs available to assist pharmacists and consumers to acquire good quality independent information on medication and therapeutics. Pharmacists can access the "Therapeutic Advisory and Information Service " (TAIS) on 1300 138677. this service will give the pharmacist immediate access to information about new drugs, interactions with other dugs, foods or complementary therapies, side effects including the more unusual ones that are not in the approved product information, safety of drugs in pregnancy and lactation and the evidence for the use of drugs for unlicensed indications.

Another area of interest to pharmacist is the self audits produced by NPS. These self audits contain excellent material to reinforce the therapeutic guidelines for the management and treatment of disease states like osteoporosis and allergic rhinitis. Reading this material and performing the self audit with the pharmacy's customer helps to reinforce the practice of information gathering and analyses of the data that all pharmacists and pharmacy assistants should be practicing in their contact with customers. The self audits are an excellent training tool for the pharmacists to use with their staff and pre-registration graduates to help reinforce the procedure for data collection and when to refer to a pharmacist. The key counseling messages are reinforced in the material supplied by NPS. In the past year, Queensland and Victoria have included the self-audits as part of their pre-registration program.

NPS also produces excellent material in the "Pharmacy Letter and the NPS News' publications. The informative 'Australian Prescriber' is now produced under the auspices of NPS.

Pharmacists are often critical of the lack of independent therapeutic information that they can access for free. The National Prescribing Service is providing a valuable service that Pharmacists and other health professionals are now able to access. We must move to utilize this resource or we may lose it if the uptake of these services does not warrant the expenditure of human and monetary resources.

A happy and safe festive season to all
Karalyn Huxhagen
December 2003