Psychotropic Drug Advisory Service – PDAS

Clinical service overview

PDAS provides patient-focused clinical advice to various healthcare providers to optimise the safe and efficacious use of psychotropic medicines.

Enquiries received can range from relatively simple, straightforward questions about a medicine to more complex clinical scenarios.

PDAS can help interpret current literature and contemporary best practice guidelines to provide medicines information and assist or support clinicians with medication decision-making.

Some sample types of enquiries:

• Medication identification e.g. international medications or clinical trial medications.
• Treatment resistance e.g. what medicine(s) may be appropriate when my patient has not responded or tolerated a number of previous medications?
• Physical or medical comorbidities e.g. are any psychotropic medications contraindicated? Are the psychotropic medications implicated in developing or worsening a particular medical condition?
• Medication interactions (including psychotropic medicines, physical health medicines, illicit substances, complementary and herbal medications).
• Investigation and management of medication related side effects e.g. my patient is reporting a medication adverse effect and is there a relationship with the medicine(s) they are taking?
• Direction to recent guidelines or evidence to promote best practice.
• Medication monitoring (including plasma drug levels, metabolic monitoring and/or pharmacogenomics).

What other services does PDAS provide?

PDAS can also provide internal or external education and presentations to healthcare professionals, non-government organisations and other groups or forums, as deemed appropriate.

The information is framed to meet your needs, and can be delivered in a number of different ways – please contact our service for further information about this.