Drug handling: Information sources

Last updated: Thursday, November 22, 2018

Drug handling problems can be complex, but for straightforward clinical situations concerned with sampling times and so forth, check to see if you have an in-house policy at your hospital. Alternatively try the TDM table we have produced here for general guidance. SmPCs often have TDM information for drugs with a narrow therapeutic range, and will also provide some basic pharmacokinetic data for most drugs.

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Martindale, Micromedex and similar sources can be helpful for determining a range of kinetic data including time to onset of action, protein binding, Vd, metabolism and excretion.

There are a number of pharmacokinetics books available, most are fairly in-depth and so consult these only after you’ve tried the above. An examples is Winter's Basic Clinical Pharmacokinetics by Paul Beringer (Wolters Kluwer).

Be careful about conducting a general internet search on this subject. If you do, you may like to look at our brief guide to evaluating websites about medicines.

Presenting your answer 

Once you’ve asked sufficient questions, gathered the information required and assessed it, you’ll need to provide an answer. We can offer you some general guidance on answering clinical problems.