This week is ‘Ask a Pharmacist’ week and, if you were in the Cambridge University Hospitals, that would mean approaching the team at the Medicines Information (MI) department, who offer staff and patients advice on all aspects of medication use.

Ebraheem Junaid (pictured) and the team are keen users of the Medical Library to supplement their own knowledge and resources, and they use us for staff training in searching the database Embase and in critical appraisal. (For more information on this, and other training that we offer, see here or contact us at librarytraining@medschl.cam.ac.uk.) Medicines Information contact us if they need a literature search, or specific articles, and their colleagues borrow our books on specialist subjects, or sometimes submit book suggestions to encourage us to buy items that we don’t currently have.

Training and keeping up to date are very important for the Medicines Information team as they are used to dealing with staff and patient enquiries on such diverse subjects as the dosing and frequency of medicines, administration of medication, side effects and yellow card reporting, and more. They can even offer advice concerning the use of herbal and complementary medicine. For more information about the work done by this team, see their website.