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RCPCH and NPPG Joint Medicines Committee
- Steve TomlinDirector of the Children’s Medicines Research & Innovation Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital and Chair of the Joint Medicines Committee
Key points
- The Joint Medicines Committee is shared between the Royal College and the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group, which makes it multi-professional.
- It takes up current topics, lobbies and solves problems, including those arising from Regulation 28 cases from coroners.
- Coming up with agreed answers is only part of the work, because getting them implemented is probably the trickiest bit.
Steve Tomlin, Director of the Children’s Medicines Research & Innovation Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital and Chair of the Joint Medicines Committee, provides insights into the unique structure and influence of this multi-professional committee. The committee is a collaboration between the Royal College and the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group, and includes representatives from organizations such as the BNF, MHRA, and ABPI. Steve highlights that the committee is not limited to a single issue but is instrumental in addressing current challenges, lobbying for change, and solving complex problems, such as those arising from coroners’ Regulation 28 cases. He emphasises the importance of both developing solutions and ensuring their implementation, noting that consensus and multi-professional perspectives are central to the committee’s effectiveness. Steve also reflects on the committee’s legacy, including the creation of the BNF for Children and Medicines for Children, and states that current priorities are firmly focused on safety in paediatric medicines. This interview took place at the RCPCH conference 2025 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Read the transcript
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, so check it against the video before quoting.
Hi, I'm Steve Tomlin and I'm lucky enough to be the chair of the joint medicines committee at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Say joint, it's joint between the Royal College and the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacists Group and that makes it quite special. There's not many committees of that nature which are multi-professional.
We're also really lucky. We've got the BNF, the MHRA, the ABPI and lots of other people on it. So, it's quite an influential committee, but more than that, it's got all sorts of brains around the table to discuss poignant points.
The committee is not there for one specific issue. It's picking up on topics which are current. It's there for lobbying. It's there for solving problems. At the moment, we're actually dealing with quite a lot of Regulation 28 from coroners cases. And once you actually start looking at the detail of those, you realise how much we don't have defined in practice and it's very easy to think all of these things everybody knows the answers and it's doing the same thing. We know that they don't and therefore somebody has to come up with an answer.
And so as well as trying to come up with an answer and then getting everybody to agree that answer, there's also the implementation and that's probably the trickiest bit. So, one thing is coming up with answers, two is getting them out there. And that's really what the medicines committee is about, but having all of those different players on board means it is multi-professional and it looks at every topic from almost every angle that you would want a medicine topic to be looked at.
So, we're really proud of the committee. When it started, that's where the BNF for Children came from. Medicines for Children came out of that committee. It's hard to know what the next big thing is to come out of the committee, but certainly we are moving all sorts of topics forward and it seems to be safety that everyone is actually concentrating on. So at the moment we seem to be safety, safety, safety and working with many people. Great committee to be involved with.
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Cite this video
Steve Tomlin. “RCPCH and NPPG Joint Medicines Committee.” The Paediatric Video Journal, 23 June 2025. https://paediatricvj.com/videos/rcpch-and-nppg-joint-medicines-committee-tomlin/
This interview is educational content intended for healthcare professionals and is not medical advice. Views expressed are those of the speaker. © The Paediatric Video Journal. All rights reserved.