Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what discussions he has had with the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency about the requirement for some generic medicines to be given a brand name for clinical reasons; and what steps he is taking to ensure patients receive the brand name medicine specified.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is the Executive Agency of Department of Health with overall responsibility for medicines licensing.

The responsibility for prescribing rests with the practitioner who has clinical responsibility for their patient's care and we would expect practitioners to take any relevant guidance into account when making their prescribing decisions.Prescribers utilise a wide range of information to inform their prescribing decisions including decision support systems and authoritative guidance such as that from the MHRA, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the British National Formulary.

In primary care, if it is clinically appropriate for an individual patient to be maintained on a specific manufacturer’s product then the prescriber can specify this on the prescription for that product to be dispensed. Officials from the Department and MHRA liaise as required on the application of this policy.