Registered dentists are legally entitled to prescribe from the entirety of the British National Formulary (BNF) and BNF for Children (BNFC). However, dental prescribing within the National Health Service (NHS) is restricted to those drugs contained within the List of Dental Preparations in the Dental Practitioners Formulary (DPF). Since 2005 the DPF, which was formerly a distinct publication, has been incorporated into the body of the British National Formulary and the BNF for Children. Both the BNF and BNFC are available as print and online editions, with an updated volume of the BNF print edition issued every six months and an updated volume of the BNFC print edition issued yearly. The online editions of both the BNF and BNFC are updated monthly which enables access to the latest prescribing information (www.bnf.org). To facilitate easy access to information that is most relevant to drug prescribing for dentistry, the Scottish Dental Clinical Effectiveness Programme (SDCEP; www.sdcep.org.uk) convened a Guidance Development Group in 2005 to produce guidance that brings together the essential information from the BNF and BNFC. Further details about SDCEP and the development of this
guidance are given in Appendix 1. Edition one of this guidance was published in April 2008, with updates provided periodically. A second edition was published in August 2011. This third edition of the Drug Prescribing For Dentistry guidance is based on BNF 701 and BNFC 2015-167 and supersedes the first two editions and their updates. An app, (Dental Prescribing) was released in 2012 and is regularly updated in line with changes to the print editions of the BNF.