British formulary for children launched
In the UK, another new reference book has been created, called the British National Formulary (BNF) for Children, designed to aid doctors prescribe for children from newborns up until the age of 18. This would be especially helpful for doctors who aren’t pediatricians who prescribe for children, who rely on their memories or sometimes outdated charts for their information. In the United States, we have doctors who diagnose a problem and then to pick a drug out of a book. This results in occasionally-funny situations at the pharmacy that often go something like this:
“I need this filled.”
“OK, Hmm.” *wanders off to pharmacist* “Hey what’s this?”
“Haha! I haven’t seen a prescription for this in fifteen years! It doesn’t exist anymore.”
This type of scenario wouldn’t happen, because the book will be kept current, with a new issue every year. (This is similar to Drug Facts and Comparisons in the US, which is updated monthly.) The guide is written by experts from Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group, the British Medical Association and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. The guide will be made available free of charge to practitioners, and will be a companion to the BNF for adults that has been a British medical staple for years.
The creators of the publication wouldn’t be amiss in creating an electronic version of their text: updates would be easier, and as doctor’s offices progressively become more digitized, cross-referencing with a resource like BNF could be more easily integrated into sending an electronic prescription somewhere.
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There is an electronic version at http://bnfc.org/
Comment by Anonymous — September 22, 2005 @ 4:16 am