MHRA

Medicine Safety Communications 

Ensuring critical safety information reaches clinicians

Direct Healthcare Professional Communications (DHCPs) are used by medicine licence-holders to inform clinicians about safety issues that might affect their prescribing decisions. We were commissioned by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to track how specific DHPCs reached their target audiences (from a consultant in a teaching hospital to a nurse practitioner in a prison) and were acted on.

We adopted a mixed method approach: identify a sample for each DHPC covering all the main audiences and settings; use emails and phone calls to establish if participants had received and acted on the DHPCs; and held longer depth interviews with a representative sample covering all kinds of clinicians. As the timing of DHCPs is a confidential regulatory matter, we only had a week’s warning before each was issued, but through advance planning we were able to recruit over a hundred healthcare professionals to provide feedback.  The final report contained far-reaching recommendations on the design of DHPCs and electronic distribution, subsequently actioned.