Short notes on open-access and free online resources for pharmacology and clinical pharmacology. Principles: quality, trustworthy, and free of dodgy ads.

Anywhere. Top two comprehensive resources:

The IUPhar Pharmacology Education Project covers scientific early-years topics in outline, linking to star-rated external resources for further information. Excellent, from the Internation Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology.

NPS.org.au has a lot of excellent open-access classes around diagnosis and prescribing, most centred on a case, with links to guidelines and further info. Therefore aimed at mostly later (clinical) years students or practitioners. Provenance from one country (Australia) not too limiting. Registration required but free. Quite a lot of clicking through the lessons, and for full value, follow the links to further info and guidance. But not image-heavy. Course catalogue (suggest filter on students and medical practitioners).

Anywhere: See also:

eDrug (University of Edinburgh) – a project initiated by Prof Simon Maxwell. Lists a drug from each core drug class, mentions pharmacology and clinical use, with reference to resources available externally. In need of updating and linkage of new resources. We’re reviewing whether this is the right place for it or whether it should all be at IUPhar. Contact us with issues, or requests to add more core drugs. Ideal for linking to other teaching resources.

Prof Simon Maxwell (University of Edinburgh) has posted a great series of lectures aimed mostly at early years medical students. Video so relatively data-heavy. Some are few years old but principles haven’t changed so much. These are also all linked from the Clinical Pharmacology section of the IUPhar Education Project mentioned above.

• What is clinical pharmacology? (7 minutes)
• 22 more Simon Maxwell videos, longer, around early years prescribing topic.

Other videos in his Vimeo account are about the later-years Prescribing Safety Assessment, which final year medical students take in the UK.

• 2 examples of Pharm videos on YouTube, selected as they seem pretty good and have a lot more – there are many more on YouTube:
  • Antibiotic classes in 7 mins (Dr Matt and Dr Mike)
  • Diabetes drugs + mechanism of action, 17 mins (Speed Pharmacology)

Open within UK, but limited international availability

Script Safe Prescribing is a free online learning resource about prescribing for those with an NHS email address. Academic institutions can subscribe. Contains a lot of very good info, but it overlaps with other info sources (goes well beyone prescribing), and feels quite UK-centric in content, resources it assumes you have access to, and in regulatory context.

The British National Formulary (BNF: version for children also linked there). In the UK this is an essential in-hand or on-device reference (the app is very good), for an overview of a topic, getting doses correct, and listing side effects and cautions. It doesn’t go into mechanism of action, or give details of effectiveness. Access to it is limited internationally.

Open-access Pharmacology resources / neilturn by Neil Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0