What's new?
➔ We have busily updating multiple topics across the site including Alternative medicines, Adverse reactions, Interactions and Communication [December 2024]
➔ We have updated the Managing medicines topic to take account changes to the organisation of the NHS, and refreshed the topics on Antibiotics and Calculations [July 2024]
➔ Check out our new topic on Pharmacogenomics funded by NHS England. We hope it is helpful - please let us know here [March 2024]
➔ Refresh your knowledge of Excipients and Breastfeeding and Drug handling with our updated topics on these subjects [December 2023]
➔ We have moved all the quizzes to a new platform that will enable learners to download a copy of their results to save in their portfolios and share with their tutors. We have also updated the Administration topic. [July 2022]
➔ Over the last few months we have updated the topics on Children and Alternative medicine. [May 2022]
➔ We have created a new page that signposts to sources of Ukrainian medicines information. Please contact us if you discover other sources and we will add them to the page. [March 2022]
➔ We have updated the key core tutorials on Adverse drug reactions, Interactions and Injection compatibility. Trainee and foundation pharmacists please let us know what you think. [November 2021]
➔ Over the Summer we have been busily updating the topic on Antibiotics, Inherited disorders, Managing medicines and Research. [September 2021]
➔ Thanks to expert advice from Alan Pollard at the College of Mental Health Pharmacy we have updated the Mental health tutorial. We are very grateful for his support, and hope you find it useful. [April 2021]
➔ Check out our new pages on infusion pumps and let us know what you think. The page on intravenous access devices is one of the most popular on the Medicines Learning Portal, and we hope these new pages will be helpful too. [March 2021]
➔ We have updated the clinical tutorial on Palliative care, one of our specialist topics written for Foundation Pharmacists. [January 2021]
➔ Today we launch our sister site the Medicine Safety Portal, aimed at pharmacists and doctors in primary care. It includes clinical tutorials on subjects such as anticholinergics, sulfonylureas, and low dose methotrexate. It also has practical guides to problem solving on topics such as drug shortages, and crushing tablets. There is an index to e-learning about medicines safety available to the NHS as well. [ July 2020 ]
➔ We have a tutorial on excipients that we've just updated. It's an introduction to the ingredients in medicines – such as preservatives and lactose – that may cause issues for certain patients, often due to allergy or intolerance. [ November 2019 ]
➔ Thanks to learner feedback, we've added a suggested time for completion to most tutorials. You can find this in the learning outcomes sections. See an example here. We estimate most tutorials will take about 90 minutes (including all the Learning Exercises). [ October 2019 ]
➔ The Liver tutorial has been updated. We could not have done this without great support and input from expert pharmacists in the clinical pharmacy and medicines advice teams at Leeds Teaching Hospitals. Thank you very much to Penny North-Lewis, Louise McGivern, Dane Howard, Sally Midgley, and Dave Abbott. [ September 2019 ]
➔ There's a recurring section on 'general questions to ask' when confronted with any clinical problem. We link to this in all the clinical tutorials via the Questions to Ask sections. We've just updated it. [ May 2019 ]
➔ We are indebted to our colleagues at UKDILAS, the specialist breastfeeding advice service that is part of UKMi. Laura Kearney and Sarah Fenner have helped us to update and improve the Breastfeeding tutorial. [ April 2019 ]
➔ The Pregnancy tutorial has been updated, and now includes a section on talking to patients about using medicines in pregnancy. [ February 2019 ]
➔ The existing page on shortages of medicines in the Managing medicines tutorial has been expanded. It now has three follow-on pages about questions to ask when managing an individual hospital inpatient affected by a medicine not being available. Click on Next page at the bottom of the existing page to see this new material. [ February 2019 ]
➔ A number of our tutorials have been updated recently including Administration of medicines, Drug handling, Children, and Renal. [ December 2018 ]
➔ We've updated the tutorial on Alternative medicine for you. [ September 2018 ]
➔ Our tutorial on Communication skills has now been updated. It includes advice and information about writing professional emails, telephone technique, body language and much more. [ August 2018 ]
➔ The Managing Medicines tutorial is one of our most popular sections and we have now updated the content. Thank you to all the many people who helped us with this. [ July 2018 ]
➔ We have fully updated the Critical Evaluation tutorial and added new pages to the section on Antibiotics. [ July 2018 ]
➔ There is now a one page outline of the Medicines Learning Portal that you may want to use to tell learners or colleagues about the site. There is a link to it at the bottom of the Home Page also. [ June 2018 ]
➔ We're delighted to announce that University Hospital Southampton has won the 2018 HSJ Value Award for Training and Development for creating the Medicines Learning Portal. The judges said: This winning entry displayed a clear and effective use of technology to meet training needs through innovative content and evidence of collaborative working. The judges also felt this project is extremely wide reaching with huge potential for national adoption.
We're thrilled and deeply honoured! Thank you everyone for your support and encouragement. [ June 2018 ]
➔ We have fully updated the tutorial on Injection compatibility. [ May 2018 ]
➔ The Medicines Learning Portal has been shortlisted for the Health Service Journal 'NHS Value Award for Education and Training'. Please keep your fingers crossed for us! Winner will be announced on June 7th. [ April 2018 ]
➔ We've just updated the Adverse reactions tutorial, using a similar approach to that used for the Drug interactions tutorial update. Some extra material has been added and this has meant re-ordering two pages, but the URLs for every page has stayed the same. [ January 2018 ]
➔ Our second Newsletter of 2017 is available; it summarises what we've done since the last one. You can see earlier newsletters here. [ December 2017 ]
➔ We're beginning a programme of updating some tutorials that are about two years old, starting with the Drug interactions tutorial which has now been completely updated. Thank you to everyone who's given us ideas for improving the site and we've taken many of these on board when updating the interactions tutorial. Some new things we've done include:
- A one-page summary of the tutorial's key points called 'Learning Portal Lite'.
- Some interactive 'quick ward questions' throughout the learning.
- A new section on talking to patients about interactions.
- Example CPD activities.
- A pictorial way to illustrate questions to ask when problem-solving.
➔ We've a new tutorial on Research in the Professional skills section. It's a brief introduction to the skills required to evaluate and develop the services we offer to patients and NHS colleagues in an evidence-based way. We'd like to thank Kumud Kantilal (PhD student, University of East Anglia), Andy Fox (Director, Southampton Pharmacy Research Centre), and Professor David Brown, formerly of Portsmouth School of Pharmacy for their help in creating this content. [ November 2017 ]
➔ Porphyria, cystic fibrosis, G6PD deficiency, and phenylketonuria are inherited disorders where the pharmacist has an important role to protect the patient by ensuring that the safest medicine and regimen is used. Our new tutorial explains the basics, with special thanks to pharmacist Cerys Lockett and Dr Mike Badminton from University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff. [ May 2017 ]
➔ A good way to improve your medicines optimisation skills is to listen to clinical experts describing how they solve or prevent problems with medicines in their practice. We have now added two online interviews with this in mind. The first concerns medicines that prolong the QT interval and the second describes administration of medicines to patients with PEG tubes. Please scroll to the bottom of the page in each case. A special thank you to Sue Green and Michelle Cerrato for being our first interviewees. Audio content is new for us, so we'd appreciate your feedback about this, your ideas for future topics, or any technical issues that audio presents for you. Please contact us. [ February 2017 ]
➔ A new section on calculations involving medicines has been created for you. It mainly brings together various online resources available elsewhere on the web, but we have also created a quiz for learners. [ January 2017 ]
➔ We have a new tutorial on excipients in the specialist clinical topics section. If you've ever wondered how to manage patients with lactose intolerance or people who develop a rash due to preservatives in their medicines, then hopefully this tutorial will help you. [ December 2016 ]
➔ We've now included some general guidance on answering a clinical problem at the end of every tutorial (at the bottom of each Information Sources section). We've also added a link to this page in a re-vamped version of the How to Use the Site page as well. [ September 2016 ]
➔ The on-call section of the site has now gone live, although we hope to add some more training scenarios in due course. A large number of people have helped with this, but we'd particular like to thank Mark Cheeseman (deputy chief at Addenbrookes), the Thames Valley and Wessex Chief Pharmacists' Group, the Hospital Expert Advisory Group of RPS, and Jennie Ross at UHS. [ September 2016 ]
➔ The Palliative Care and Alternative Medicine tutorials each include two new quizzes and three real clinical problems in their Learning Exercises sections. [ August 2016 ]
➔ The launch of the new Specialist Pharmacy Service website means that we've updated many links that formerly pointed to the UKMi or NICE Evidence websites. Please contact us if you find one we've missed. [ August 2016 ]
➔ Our latest Newsletter describing how we are developing the site is now available. [ August 2016 ]
➔ All our images and documents have now been moved to a new file host, which should have resolved the problems with files being blocked on a small number of NHS computers. If you still have any problems, or files/images are still blocked for you, please contact us. Thank you to the many colleagues in the NHS who have helped us test this new solution. [ August 2016 ]
➔ We have updated the assessment document for foundation pharmacists during MI rotations. We are grateful to the UKMi Education & Training Working Group for all their advice and input into this. It's a Word document and you can download it from the How to Use the Site page. [ July 2016 ]
➔ We have completed a Mental Health tutorial, which looks at some of the commoner areas where pharmacists are asked to solve clinical problems. Thank you to everyone who assisted us with this, especially Rachel Brown, Clinical Lead Pharmacist, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. [ July 2016 ]
➔ There is a new page on intravenous access devices in the Administration tutorial which describes and shows pictures of Venflons, PICC lines, multilumen catheters, Hickman lines etc. A particular 'thank you' to specialist nurses Zillah Leach and Katie Scales, and to the Injectable Medicines Guide team for helping us with this. [ May 2016 ]
➔ We've introduced a quick guide to help you evaluate websites about medicines that you may find after conducting an internet search. We've added a link to it at the bottom of every 'Information Sources' section within each Clinical and Specialist topic. [ April 2016 ]
➔ Following feedback from several pharmacist tutors, we have designed a document to enable pre-reg and foundation pharmacists to track their progress as they complete each tutorial and so provide evidence of their learning. You can access this document via the How to Use the Site link on the home page. [ April 2016 ]
➔ We have redesigned the home page to make it less crowded and hopefully more appealing, and we now include the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's logo on our site following their recent endorsement. [ April 2016 ]
➔ The Breastfeeding tutorial has been revised and updated, thanks to our partners at the UK Drugs in Lactation Advisory Service (the UKMi regional centres at Trent and West Midlands). [ March 2016 ]
➔ The Clinical Topic on Administration now contains a section on extravasation. [ March 2016 ]
➔ The Managing Medicines tutorial within the Professional Skills section has now gone live. Any comments very welcome. [ February 2016 ]
➔ Our latest Newsletter describing how we are developing the site is now available. [ February 2016 ]