What we can do for you

Prescribing support at the RDTC has team members from a wide variety of backgrounds. This skill mix is a real strength, helping us bring you the best possible evidence evaluation and prescribing data analysis.

The whole team contributes to our publications and reports, support the centre’s regional medicines information service, and provide strategic medicines optimisation support. We draw on our diverse backgrounds to make everything we produce as useful as possible to our colleagues in the wider NHS.

Pharmacists

Around half of our team are pharmacists, some with over 20 years of experience working in the NHS. They have a wide variety of postgraduate qualifications at all levels, from certificates to PhDs, and covering diverse topics and disciplines such as clinical pharmacy, public health, psychiatric pharmacy, and independent prescribing. Our pharmacists have practiced across all sectors in community, primary care and secondary care, and in diverse disciplines such as clinical pharmacy, formulary management, medicines information, clinical trials, and research.

As well as supporting prescribing support publications and services, the team also provides professional secretarial support to a variety of groups. This includes committees across the North East and North Cumbria, North West, and Yorkshire and the Humber, supporting decision making at local, ICS, and regional levels.

Scientists

Our scientists are also from diverse backgrounds, with degrees and other qualifications in biomedical science, pharmacology, cardiovascular pharmacology, human toxicology, health technology appraisal, and health economics. The team has decades of experience in provision of health information to the public and healthcare professionals in a variety of roles including pharmacy technician, health information adviser, and medical information scientist.

The team specialises in the identification and retrieval of relevant information on medicines, and in delivering it to the end user in the most useful way possible – anything from a simple verbal answer, to a detailed written report.

Data analysts

Our data team specialises in the analysis of primary care prescribing data, and in using a variety of datasets to generate insights into prescribing trends. The team includes analysts and a statistician, and uses a range of tools to produce reports that fit a variety of needs.

Team members each have at least 10 years of experience in managing healthcare data and producing reports that allow stakeholders to interrogate their prescribing data, analyse the impact of price changes, and identify opportunities to optimise prescribing patterns.  

NICE Accreditation

The process used to produce RDTC New Drug Evaluations (NDEs) is accredited by NICE. This means you can be assured that our NDEs are high quality and evidence-based.

Due to the time limited nature of NDEs they are published with the expectation that they will not be routinely scheduled for review. In view of the continued emergence of new evidence, readers are recommended to re-check the biomedical literature after 18 months beyond the publication date of each NDE

For full details of our publication process see the RDTC New Drug Evaluation process manual.

NICE has accredited the process used by the Regional Drug and Therapeutics Centre to produce New Drug Evaluations.
For more information visit www.nice.org/accreditation