Pregnancy and breastfeeding medicines guide

https://thewomenspbmg.org.au
Melbourne: The Royal Women’s Hospital

This website lives up to its description of a quick reference guide for healthcare professionals that provides practical and unbiased specialised information on medicine use in pregnancy and breastfeeding. The online format has replaced the hard copy version which was last published in November 2014.

The guide includes an A–Z listing of over 900 evidence-based individual medicine monographs which support prescribing during pregnancy and breastfeeding. It also includes summaries of therapeutic groups such as antidepressants and antihistamines with general advice about the pharmacological management of common conditions such as nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, and constipation.

One hopes that the online format makes this resource more appealing to pharmacists in the community as it is clearly far superior to other prescribing references such as MIMS. The guide would also be a very useful resource for busy obstetricians in private practice (as well as hospital antenatal clinics).

This guide includes medicines available in Australia but not in the USA (e.g. cyproterone). There is often limited or no information about these drugs in other resources.^1-3

Annual subscription is $170 making this a little pricier than your average reference book. However, the guide has monthly updates which include information about new drugs, as well as updated data about older medicines or therapeutic groups.

Overall I think this is an excellent resource and congratulate the authors on putting it all together in such a user-friendly format. I would recommend it to all maternity hospitals and community pharmacies to optimise medicine use and prescribing in pregnant and breastfeeding women.