A service evaluation to investigate the costs avoided by the provision of medicines information service

Background and objective: To calculate the potential costs of doctors answering their own medicine information queries in the absence of medicine information services to enable a cost-effectiveness model for hospital based medicine information service to be developed. Setting and Method: A telephone survey over six months in a large teaching hospital in England; after appropriate ethical approval has received doctors phoned MI centre with queries related to specific patient and agreed verbally to participate in the study were asked what they would do in the absence of medicine information service and were estimated how long they would spend in answering process. Data collection form were designed and were tested, during pilot study, to captures the data required to estimate the time taken of doctors answering their medicine information queries in the absence of the medicine information service. The costs of both doctors and medicine information staff providing medicine information answering service were calculated using the published salary survey on the unit costs (PSSU) of health and social care 2011. Mean and 95% confident intervals (CI) were used to describe results.