NHS Lothian Shared Care Agreements

The NHS Lothian Policy and Procedures for the Shared Care of Medicines is available from the NHS Lothian Medicines Governance Policies page. Template documents relating to local shared care arrangements are available on NHS Lothian Policy Online.

For the purposes of this policy a medicine is considered to be eligible for a shared care arrangement if it can be initiated in secondary care and then prescribed by a GP in primary care and meets the following criteria:

• prescribed for a potentially serious condition
• complex (intended use likely to be outwith the clinical experience of a GP)
• relatively high adverse effects profile
• may require specific monitoring and dose titration
• new, or rarely prescribed

All approved NHS Lothian Shared Care Agreements (SCAs) will be listed on this page. These are locally approved documents which provide additional guidance to GPs for complex treatments, routinely used in a specialist setting and approved as appropriate for use in primary care.