Scottish Medicines Consortium
The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) has the role of providing advice to NHS Boards and their Area Drug and Therapeutics Committees (ADTCs) about all newly licensed medicines.
It seeks to supply advice within 12 weeks of a new medicine being licensed to ensure that patients who could benefit can get access to the medicine as quickly as possible. The speed of the process has allowed the SMC to be compared favourably against the performance of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) which performs a similar role for the NHS in England and Wales. On one occasion, NICE was accused of incompetence by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) for delaying issuing advice for England and Wales about a drug that had already been approved for use in Scotland by the SMC.
Read more about this topic: Scottish Medicines Consortium, Units Within Healthcare Improvement Scotland
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