Pink Book General Advice and Introduction

Welcome

• The Pharmacology Guidelines button has changed to a Prescribing Guidelines button (for more details, see below).

Introduction

• The Pharmacology Guidelines have been split into Prescribing Guidelines and a Pharmacokinetic Table. The Introduction wording has been amended to support this change (for more details, see below).

Prescribing Guidelines

• New title (previously titled Pharmacology Guidelines)
• The Committee has changed this name to assist user navigation to pertinent information that supports safe, rational prescribing.
• These guidelines facilitate adaptation of medicine dosage to patient characteristics, and outline therapeutic drug and adverse reaction monitoring.

Pharmacokinetic Table

• Title changed December 2019 (previously Drug Profiles)
• The Committee changed this name to better reflect its evolving work, which focuses on condensed key pharmacokinetic data for commonly used medicines (previously pharmacodynamics data was included). In this update, the table is reformatted to reflect this focus.
• With the maturation of alternative sources of medicine information for CDHB and New Zealand (such as Hospital HealthPathways and the New Zealand Formulary) the Committee is focused on provision of data that is not conveniently accessible to CDHB prescribers in these resources, such as oral bioavailability, half-life and drug elimination.

Hospital electronic prescribing for community dispensing: The Ministry of Health waiver that allows electronically written prescriptions, delivered electronically to a pharmacy of the patient’s choice, has been extended. CDHB has a waiver-compliant prescription in Health Connect South (HCS), and secure delivery mechanism to community pharmacy via the Electronic Referral Management System (ERMS). Both are available now, and replace paper prescriptions in nearly all situations. For further information see Prescribing Instructions for Medicines and generating electronic prescriptions.