What this is
ResusDoc Drug Monographs is a free reference on drugs used in the emergency department, written for UK-registered healthcare professionals. Each monograph covers the pharmacology, the licensed UK dosing, the contraindications, the evidence base and — where it exists — the gap between what the licence says and what current practice does.
It is not patient information, and it is not a substitute for the Summary of Product Characteristics, the BNF, or your own trust's guidelines and formulary. Where this site and your local policy disagree, follow your local policy.
Who writes it
Written and edited by Dr Nirmalya Hore, Associate Specialist in Emergency Medicine, practising in the UK NHS.
This is a personal, independent project. It is not produced by, affiliated with, or endorsed by any NHS body, royal college, university or pharmaceutical company. No content is sponsored, commissioned or reviewed by any manufacturer.
How it is written — including the use of AI
The verification process
- Every dose, licensing statement and contraindication is checked against a primary source — normally the current Summary of Product Characteristics on the electronic Medicines Compendium, fetched directly rather than taken from a search result or a secondary summary.
- Resuscitation and algorithm content is checked against the current Resuscitation Council UK guidelines, using the published 2025 algorithms rather than older teaching material.
- Trial claims are checked against the trial publication, not against reviews or summaries of it.
- Where sources disagree — and they frequently do, between an SmPC and a national guideline, or between two SmPCs for the same drug — the disagreement is reported rather than resolved silently.
- A separate independent audit pass re-derives the dose claims from source without reference to the original working, specifically to catch transcription errors and stale sources.
A verification date is recorded against each reference. Where a figure could be sourced only once, or where the source could not be re-retrieved, the reference says so explicitly.
Known limitations
Stating these is more useful than implying they do not exist.
- Trial statistics are the least reliable content on this site. They are harder to verify than dosing, because there is no equivalent of the SmPC to check against, and paywalled journals frequently cannot be accessed directly. Errors in reported trial figures have been found and corrected during preparation. Treat quoted percentages and confidence intervals as a prompt to read the paper, not as a substitute for it.
- Clinical judgements are the author's. Several monographs take a position that is not stated in any SmPC or guideline — for example on when a reversal agent is not an airway rescue, or when a drug's preload effects make it dangerous. These are flagged in the text and are open to disagreement.
- Availability changes. Drugs described here may not be stocked in your department, and at least one drug named first-line in a national algorithm has no current UK marketing authorisation. Check what you can actually obtain before you need it.
- Licences and guidelines change, sometimes faster than this site does. The verification date on each reference tells you how current that specific check is.
Corrections and review
Monographs are reviewed at least annually, and sooner where a relevant guideline or product licence changes. Each page carries a last reviewed date at the foot and a version stamp in the footer.
This site holds no personal data. There are no accounts, no logins and nothing is stored about you or your patients.