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This is a place for digital teams in the NHS to work together and develop the NHS digital service manual.
https://service-manual.nhs.uk/community-and-contribution
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Medicines or drugs, e.g. in the context of chemotherapy #42

Open sarawilcox opened 5 years ago

sarawilcox commented 5 years ago

See the A to Z for our current wording. Discussed with Anna Sutton who suggested we look at this. Anna to comment on the issue Passed to live service content team for further research - in Jira backlog as SS-563.

annasutton2 commented 5 years ago

We say in https://service-manual.nhs.uk/content/a-to-z-of-nhs-health-writing that we use "medicine" and not "drug" and that "drug" is only used for illegal drugs. I'm wondering if this applies to chemotherapy drugs as well. "Chemotherapy drugs" seems to be the term used by the big cancer charities such as Macmillan and Cancer Research.

see: https://www.macmillan.org.uk/information-and-support/treating/chemotherapy/drugs-and-combination-regimens

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-in-general/treatment/cancer-drugs/drugs

There is also the "Cancer Drugs Fund" https://www.england.nhs.uk/cancer/cdf/

KarinMochan commented 5 years ago

Following on from Anna's comment, there are also drugs trials.

I don't think you'd say 'medicine trials'...

NettyKo commented 5 years ago

In the context of chemotherapy, drugs is a common term used, as Anna said, by main cancer charities and also when talking to patients.

sarawilcox commented 1 year ago

We sometimes get questions about our use of the term "medicines" instead of "medications". The NHS website medicines team made a decision to use "medicines" early on and has never seen any problems with the term. The team has user-tested a broad range of medicines content with people with lots of different conditions - as well as carrying out written surveys.

"Medicine" adheres to our plain English mantra, as it's a shorter/easier word than "medication".

We work with pharmacists on our medicines content and they have not queried our use of "medicine".