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Conclusion The Low Back Pain Clinical Care Standard meets an urgent need to provide a resource to ensure curricula relevant to low back pain are up to date, and a clear roadmap for existing clinicians to deliver best care for people with low back pain. The Low Back Pain Clinical Care Standard provides an excellent guide for how each of the professions can contribute to better care of low back pain. In September 2022, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care released its Low Back Pain Clinical Care Standard.[1] The Standard covers the early clinical management of people who present with a new acute episode of low back pain. [Extracted from the article]

An editorial is presented which discusses the release of the Low Back Pain Clinical Care Standard by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. It discusses evidence-based guidance for clinicians on the early clinical management of acute low back pain, aiming to improve the quality of care. It emphasizes the need for changes in clinician behavior, adaptation of health services, and collaborative approaches to deliver best practice care for low back pain.

Aims: Medicines regulators issue post‐market safety warnings to advise of newly uncovered risks, but with mixed impacts. We aimed to identify factors influencing the use of regulatory warnings by primary care and specialist physicians in the US and Australia. Methods: Semi‐structured qualitative interviews were carried out with 40 primary care physicians, endocrinologists and other generalist specialists in Boston (USA) and Australia. Coding and analysis were performed inductively and iteratively to identify and examine key factors. Analysis centred around four areas: physicians' awareness of drug safety information, preferred information sources, opinion‐forming and sharing of information with patients. Results: Uncertainty, trust and clinical authority emerged as factors influencing use of advisories. Although regulators were trusted as authoritative institutions, they appeared to lack clinical authority, and physicians validated regulatory information against other trusted sources including evidence, expert opinion and experience. Specialists became aware of drug safety issues through specialised literature, using evidence and clinical consensus to form opinions. Primary care physicians, fielding high volumes of information, relied on convenient, accessible information sources including the media and the "clinical grapevine" for awareness, and on clinical colleagues, specialists and experience for interpretation. Communicating risk to patients was complicated by uncertainty; physicians tailored information to patients' health literacy and information needs. US physicians were more aware of their national regulator's post‐market safety role than Australian physicians of theirs. Conclusion: Drug safety warnings may not be optimally received or used. Regulators should consider strategies that increase trust, clinical relevance and accessibility, and address physicians' needs in communicating risk to patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the withdrawal of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug rofecoxib, regulators worldwide reconsidered their approach to postmarket safety. Many have since adopted a "life cycle" approach to regulation of medicines, facilitating faster approval of new medicines while planning for potential postmarket safety issues. A crucial aspect of postmarket safety is the effective and timely communication of emerging risk information using postmarket safety advisories, commonly issued as letters to healthcare professionals, drug safety bulletins, media alerts, and website announcements. Yet regulators differ in their use of postmarket safety advisories. We examined the capacity of regulators in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia to warn about postmarket safety issues through safety advisories by assessing their governance, legislative authority, risk communication capabilities, and transparency., (© 2020 The Authors Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics © 2020 American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.)