Emma Wilkinson

MHRA gets £10m funding boost to fast-track medicines approvals process

UK medicines regulators will receive £10m to help boost the speed up the process of bringing innovative drugs and devices to patients. The Medicines and Heatlhcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will use the funding to develop fast-track approval…

Disability work assessment overhaul planned by Government

Fit-for-work tests will be scrapped as part of a major disability work assessment overhaul planned by the Government. Announcing the reforms during the Spring Budget last week, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said they were ‘the biggest changes to our welfare…

GP training to be overhauled to meet ‘ever-shifting’ needs of patients

Health Education England has outlined a new vision for general practice training which it says will better prepare GPs for future models of care. The programme will have greater focus on areas such as addressing health inequalities and managing the…

Complication rate after vasectomy ‘lower than men are led to believe’

The risk of complications after vasectomy is lower than patients are led to expect, researchers have found after looking back over 15 years of operations. Data on more than 94,000 vasectomies done by more than 100 surgeons in the UK between 2006 and…

Labour would reverse abolition of pensions Lifetime Allowance for targeted approach

Labour has said it would reverse plans to abolish the pensions Lifetime Allowance if they were voted into Government because it amounted to a ‘Tory tax cut for the rich’. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed they would reverse the move and said…

Regulator upholds GP complaint about ‘misleading’ at-home blood test

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has upheld a complaint made by a GP against a company that advertised an at-home blood test to help people manage their health as ‘free if we don’t find anything’. The website for Numan’s Fear Nothing Blood Test…

ONS to stop Covid infection weekly data report at end of month

The Covid-19 Infection Survey, set up in April 2020 to provide weekly data on rates of circulating virus and new variants as well as the prevalence of long Covid, will be paused at the end of the month. Public health officials said they were actively…

GP ‘fragmentation’ concerns over women’s health hubs expansion

The Government has said it will allocate £25 million over the next two years to speed up the development of women’s health hubs. It will provide better access to care for menstrual problems, contraception, pelvic pain and menopause care and could…

Number of patients on ADHD drugs up by 85% since 2017

There was an almost 85% increase in the number of identified patients prescribed drugs for ADHD since 2017, according to new data. And prescribing of medicines used in the treatment of ADHD rose by more than 6% at the end of last year, the latest NHS…

GPs showing signs of psychological stress and burnout in response to pandemic

The pressures of the pandemic led to signs of psychological stress and burnout among GPs, say researchers who did a series of interviews with those at different stages in their career. Work-related stress and anxiety were widely apparent during…

UKHSA expands list of close contacts to get antibiotics after strep A exposure

The list of patients eligible for antibiotics if they have been in close contact with a confirmed case of invasive strep A has been expanded. Pregnant women from 37 weeks of gestation up to 28 days after delivery, newborn babies, and household…

Offer of first and second Covid vaccinations to end in June

People will no longer be able to get a first or second dose of Covid-19 vaccine after 30 June, the Government has announced. Setting out more details of the spring booster campaign for the most vulnerable, health and social care secretary Steve…

Hours spent hunting downs meds as supply issues persist, PDA survey reveals

Over seven in 10 pharmacists are spending between one and four hours a day on sourcing medicines, a Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) survey has revealed. Over a third (34%) of respondents said they spend between two and four hours a day chasing…

GPs asked to review Parkinson’s medicines after special container status change

GPs are being asked to update their systems to ensure people with Parkinson’s disease get the right quantity of a common medicine after a reclassification under special container rules. All co-beneldopa products, including Madopar, across all…

GMC data lays bare stark racial inequalities in medical training

Inequalities experienced by medical trainees from different ethnic backgrounds have been laid bare by a report from the General Medical Council (GMC). In particular black doctors are more likely to fail specialty exams than any other ethic group,…

GPs asked to further cut addictive medicines prescribing after 450k script decline

GPs should offer alternatives including psychotherapy, sleep clinics and social activities or clubs before prescribing addictive painkillers or antidepressants, an action plan from NHS England has recommended. NHS England data shows GPs and…

Hay fever symptoms ‘more severe in urban areas’

People living in urban areas report significantly worse hay fever symptoms than those in rural areas, according to UK researchers. In the first study to carefully map hay fever symptoms with air quality, weather and land use, researcher found twice…

Ethnic minority groups no longer more likely to die from Covid

People from ethnic minority backgrounds are no longer statistically more likely to die from Covid-19, the latest analysis from the Office for National Statistics shows. Since January 2022, when Omicron became the dominant variant of Covid, there has…

Decongestant medicines under review by regulators after rare side effects

Health regulators are reviewing the safety of over-the-counter decongestants containing pseudoephedrine after concerns about extremely rare but potentially serious side effects. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said it had…

Charity in further push for prostate cancer screening programme

Testing for prostate cancer is ‘much less harmful’ than it used to be and the evidence on introducing a PSA screening programme should be reconsidered, a charity has said. An analysis by Prostate Cancer UK and presented at the American Society of…