Hello, I'm Dr. Louise Newsome and welcome to my podcast. I'm a GP and menopause specialist and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Wellbeing Centre here in Stratford-Bron-Avon. I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity and the Menopause support app called Balance.

On the podcast, I will be joined each week by an exciting guest to help provide evidence-based

information and advice about both the perimenopause and the

menopause.

So today in the podcast I have with me Jonathan Underhill, who was very kindly introduced to me

recently and he's a pharmacist, but he's also a consultant clinical advisor for the

Medicines Optimisation Team at Nice which is the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence

and it's a real honour actually to talk to you because I got in touch with you about some guidelines

which we'll talk about but before we talk about those Jonathan I'd just like to say, welcome to the podcast.

Hello, Louise. And just, that's a bit of a mouthful. So medicine's optimization team,

you actually said MOT, which for most people, it's about their car, is it really? Just explain,

if you don't mind, like what your role is with this and how you got into that, if that's okay?

Sure, yes. So it's obviously nice, as you say, as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

We are the organisation funded by the Department of Health, who we aim to reduce uncertainty

and try and reduce variation in care. So we produce clinical guidelines where we look at the evidence that's out there for particular

how you treat, diagnose, manage different conditions,

and create recommendations that are aimed to help clinicians to make better decisions

for the patients under their care.

And we also will do health technology assessments.

If a new medicine comes to market,

then what we will do is we look at the evidence for that technology,

do a cost-effectiveness analysis of it,

...