Information about us

www.bnf.org and www.medicinescomplete.com are operated by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, of  66-68 East Smithfield, London E1W 1AW, a body established by Royal Charter with VAT number 233029692 (“RPSGB”).

The British National Formulary (BNF) is jointly owned by the BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, of BMA House, Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9JR (“BMJ”), and RPSGB. The British National Formulary for Children (BNFC) is jointly owned by RPSGB, BMJ and RCPCH Publications Ltd of 5-11 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SH (“RCPCH”) (RPSGB, RCPCH and BMJ together being “We”).

Accessing our site

Free access to BNF via MedicinesComplete is available for all UK-based individuals undertaking work (or training) for or on behalf of the NHS or an NHS organisation, and for non-commercial users. If you are accessing the BNF information from an academic, commercial, governmental or healthcare organisation outside of the NHS, you can subscribe to the BNF and BNFC on MedicinesComplete.

Access to our site is permitted on a temporary basis, and we reserve the right to withdraw or amend the service we provide on our site without notice (see below). We will not be liable if for any reason our site is unavailable at any time or for any period.

From time to time, we may restrict access to some parts of our site, or our entire site, to users who have registered with us.

If you choose, or you are provided with, a user identification code, password or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential, and you must not disclose it to any third party. We have the right to disable any user identification code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, at any time, if in our opinion you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms of use.

You are responsible for making all arrangements necessary for you to have access to our site. You are also responsible for ensuring that all persons who access our site through your internet connection are aware of these terms, and that they comply with them.

Intellectual property rights

We are the owner or the licensee of all intellectual property rights in our site, and in the material published on it including without limitation the BNF and BNFC classifications. Those works are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All such rights are reserved.

Provided that all reproductions are accompanied by an appropriate citation and copyright notice, you may print off one copy, and may download extracts, of any page(s) from our site for your personal reference and you may draw the attention of others within your organisation to material posted on our site.

If you do wish to use an extract from our site (for example a paragraph, table, figure, photograph or other illustration), please check first whether the extract concerned is marked as reproduced from another published source. If so, then please contact the publisher of that source for permission to reproduce it.

You must not modify the paper or digital copies of any materials you have printed off or downloaded in any way, and you must not use any illustrations, photographs, video or audio sequences or any graphics separately from any accompanying text.

You must not use any part of the materials on our site for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors.

If you print off, copy or download any part of our site in breach of these terms of use, your right to use our site will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made.

Reliance on information posted

This website is intended to support healthcare professionals in the UK familiar with the scope and organisation of information within the BNF and BNFC and as such assumes the level of professional training required to appropriately interpret the advice contained herein. The information should be interpreted in light of professional knowledge and supplemented as necessary by specialised publications and by reference to product literature.

Consultations

There is a section on this website, Consultation, which contains reviews of or comments on draft BNF text submitted by parties, which may include you, who have no affiliation with or connection to us save insofar as we may have entered into an arrangement with them under which they submitted such review or comment (“Comments”).

Comments may be submitted to us by email to the address provided in the Consultations section. Where you submit Comments you grant us a royalty-free non-exclusive and transferable and sub-licensable licence to store transiently or permanently on any medium, transmit, reproduce, copy, publish or otherwise exploit, modify, delete, adapt, create derivative works from or based upon, or combine with other material the whole or any part of the Comments; you agree to waive all moral rights in any Comment.

We will not publish your personal information on the website, and all Comments which we publish will be anonymous.

You acknowledge that we:

• have no obligation to publish or to display your Comment or any part thereof and that we will not attribute it to you;
• may at our absolute discretion and without notice to you delete or remove from the website an attribution to you or Comment or part thereof.

You warrant and undertake to us that your Comment:

• is submitted in utmost good faith, that it is your own honest opinion and that it is not in any way false, misleading, defamatory, libellous, vindictive, offensive, unlawful, or fraudulent;
• does not and will not in any way infringe any third party intellectual property rights including without limitation copyright;
• does not encourage, assist, aid, or promote any criminal activity or offence and where the above undertakings subsequently cease to be wholly accurate or true you shall immediately contact us to relay the same and in such detail as we reasonably request so that such Comment may be deleted or amended wholly or partly.

You acknowledge that Comments are not ours and that we have no responsibility to check or to monitor the accuracy of their content. Where you encounter a Comment which you consider, acting in good faith, would breach the above undertakings, you shall contact us on consultations@bnf.org

You undertake with us that you will indemnify us and our associates against all claims, damages, losses, costs, liabilities and expenses which any of them may suffer or incur and which would not have been suffered or incurred had the above warranties been wholly correct (including in respect of any claim against any of them by a third party which such third party fails to substantiate for any reason); if any third party makes any claim relevant to this indemnity you will promptly and fully-co-operate with us and provide us with all relevant information.

Our site changes regularly

We aim to update our site regularly, and may change the content or the way the site is organised at any time. If the need arises, we may suspend access to our site, or close it indefinitely.

Our liability

The material displayed on our site is provided without any guarantees, conditions or warranties as to its accuracy. To the extent permitted by law, we, other members of our group of companies and third parties connected to us hereby expressly exclude:

• All conditions, warranties and other terms which might otherwise be implied by statute, common law or the law of equity.
• Any liability for any direct, indirect or consequential loss or damage incurred by any user in connection with our site or in connection with the use, inability to use, or results of the use of our site, any websites linked to it and any materials posted on it, including, without limitation any liability for:
• loss of income or revenue;
• loss of business;
• loss of profits or contracts;
• loss of anticipated savings;
• loss of data;
• loss of goodwill;
• wasted management or office time; and
• for any other loss or damage of any kind, however arising and whether caused by tort (including negligence), breach of contract or otherwise, even if foreseeable, provided that this condition shall not prevent claims for loss of or damage to your tangible property or any other claims for direct financial loss that are not excluded by any of the categories set out above.

This does not affect our liability for death or personal injury arising from our negligence, nor our liability for fraudulent misrepresentation or misrepresentation as to a fundamental matter, nor any other liability which cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law.

Information about you and your visits to our site

We process information about you in accordance with our privacy policy. By using our site, you consent to such processing and you warrant that all data provided by you is accurate.

Acceptable use

You may use our site only for lawful purposes. You may not use our site:

• In any way that breaches any applicable local, national or international law or regulation.
• In any way that is unlawful or fraudulent, or has any unlawful or fraudulent purpose or effect;
• For the purpose of harming or attempting to harm minors in any way; or
• To transmit, or procure the sending of, any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising or promotional material or any other form of similar solicitation (spam).

You shall not

• store permanently on any medium, transfer, transmit, reproduce, rent, sell, lease, sub-license, loan to any third party, copy, publish or otherwise exploit, modify, adapt, merge, translate, reverse, engineer, decompile, disassemble, create derivative works from or combine with other material the whole or any part of the data from this Website; or
• distribute or disclose the contents of this Website to any third party.

Viruses, hacking and other offences

You must not misuse our site by knowingly introducing viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or other material which is malicious or technologically harmful. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to our site, the server on which our site is stored or any server, computer or database connected to our site. You must not attack our site via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of service attack.

By breaching this provision, you would commit a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. We will report any such breach to the relevant law enforcement authorities and we will co-operate with those authorities by disclosing your identity to them. In the event of such a breach, your right to use our site will cease immediately.

We will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack, viruses or other technologically harmful material that may infect your computer equipment, computer programs, data or other proprietary material due to your use of our site or to your downloading of any material posted on it, or on any website linked to it.

Suspension and termination

We will determine, in our discretion, whether there has been a breach of these terms and conditions through your use of our site. When a breach of this policy has occurred, we may take such action as we deem appropriate.

Failure to comply with these terms constitutes a material breach of the terms of use upon which you are permitted to use our site, and may result in our taking all or any of the following actions:

• Immediate, temporary or permanent withdrawal of your right to use our site.
• Immediate, temporary or permanent removal of any posting or material uploaded by you to our site.
• Issue of a warning to you.
• Legal proceedings against you for reimbursement of all costs on an indemnity basis (including, but not limited to, reasonable administrative and legal costs) resulting from the breach.
• Further legal action against you.
• Disclosure of such information to law enforcement authorities as we reasonably feel is necessary.

We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of these terms. The responses described in this policy are not limited, and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.

Linking to our site

In line with established internet usage, any external website may provide a hyperlink to the homepage of our site (http://www.bnf.org) without requesting permission provided it is done in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it. Any link must respect our intellectual property rights, in particular relating to the BNF and BNFC names, logos and copyright. Hyperlinks should not frame our site or incorporate pieces of it into a different site or product.

We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.

A link to our site must be used for information only, and not for the promotion of any organisation, product or service. A link to our site does not, and should not, imply any association between the BNF and the owner of the linking site.

Links to our site should be to the home page (https://www.bnf.org/) only. We make no guarantees that we will not make changes to the site that could cause links other than to the home page to break.

After 17 November 2014 it will no longer be possible to access BNF content from the bnf.org site, and users will need to re-register to MedicinesComplete to continue access. Any individual or organisation, whether commercial or non-commercial (including NHS contractors and suppliers) wishing to link to our data should contact sales@medicinescomplete.com to discuss a licence. Such linking may be subject to access control procedures and a licence fee.

Links from our site

Where our site contains links to other sites and resources provided by third parties, these links are provided for your information only. We have no control over the contents of those sites or resources, and accept no responsibility for them or for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of them.

Jurisdiction and applicable law

The English courts will have non-exclusive jurisdiction over any claim arising from, or related to, a visit to our site although we retain the right to bring proceedings against you for breach of these conditions in your country of residence or any other relevant country.

These terms of use and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter or formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims) shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the law of England and Wales.

Trade marks

“BNF” is a registered trade mark of RPSGB and BMJ.

“BNFC” is a registered trade mark of RPSGB, BMJ and RCPCH.

“MedicinesComplete” is a registered trade mark of RPSGB.

Variations

We may revise these terms of use at any time by amending this page. You are expected to check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes we made, as they are binding on you. Some of the provisions contained in these terms of use may also be superseded by provisions or notices published elsewhere on our site.

Your concerns

If you have any concerns about information which appears on our site, please submit your enquiry here.

Thank you for visiting our site.