RECENT NEWS

Royal Philips Electronics has announced it will acquire Tomcat Systems, based in Northern Ireland.

The Institute for Decontamination Sciences (IDSc) has recently endorsed the programme of City & Guilds Accredited training courses run by Lancer Academy for decontamination of endoscopes and instruments.

Medipex, the NHS Innovation Hub for the Yorkshire and Humber region, has being crowned “Innovation Champion 2008” in an awards ceremony at Leeds.

Mölnlycke Health Care and the European Operating Room Nurses Association (EORNA) are raising the research level within perioperative nursing by offering a grant of €30,000.

Nearly £9.5 million has been invested by the European Commission into a new pan- European partnership which will design an advanced diagnostic tool for the detection and control of a potentially life-threatening auto-immune condition, coeliac disease, which is claimed to be the most underdiagnosed common chronic condition in the UK. It is estimated that at least 1 in 100 people in the UK suffer from the condition, leading to serious health problems such as osteoporosis, gastro-intestinal cancer and increased risk of other autoimmune diseases.

Plans are being made for highly skilled NHS specialists to be able to deploy on short operational assignments to places such as Iraq and Afghanistan to provide specialist care to the armed forces.

Doctors at Barts and The London NHS Trust are continuing to pioneer ways of combating MRSA by testing a new wound change mat that could cut infection rates if successful.

Waiting times for key diagnostic tests have been significantly reduced at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton. The maximum wait for plain film X-rays, CT scans, Dexa scans and MRI scans is now no more than three weeks, with many patients being seen sooner.

Sixty thousand new doctors will be specifically trained in the next ten years to identify and treat people who are drinking too much, Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo has announced. Medical schools have been allocated £650,000 to do a scoping exercise next financial year to see how alcohol misuse training can be added to the curriculum.

The BMA has requested an urgent meeting with NHS employers to open negotiations with junior doctors.The move follows the announcement of below-inflation pay awards for hospital doctors. The BMA’s Junior Doctors Committee said it was particularly angered by the refusal of the doctors’ pay review body to recommend a compensatory increase for first year junior doctors, who have lost their right to live on hospital premises free of charge from this year.

Managers at Staffordshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust took risks with the safety of patients, staff and volunteers, according to an investigation published by the Healthcare Commission. The investigation, covering the period April 2004 to June 2007, highlighted problems at the former Trust including the poor management of controlled drugs, “community first responders” (emergency ambulance volunteers) and an out-of-hours GP service.

US scientists claim to have developed a drug which may protect the body against damage from radiation.

The BMA has warned Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, that more consultants are needed. In particular, there are shortfalls in the areas of emergency medicine, intensive care, trauma care, acute medicine, paediatrics and obstetrics.

Researchers at Uppsala University, in Sweden, have found that men who develop diabetes in middle age are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s later in life.

A former Trust chief, who found herself at the centre of a scandal over hygiene standards, has announced plans to sue.

The Government has given the go-ahead for three more independent sector treatment centres to undertake minor procedures for the NHS.

California researchers believe they have found a way of improving brain cell communication by injecting a drug called etanercept into the neck, according to a report by the BBC.

More than one in four student nurses leave their courses before qualifying, at a cost of £100 million per year to taxpayers, according to data obtained by Nursing Standard magazine.

Experts have warned that a surge of Parkinson’s disease linked to rapidly ageing populations worldwide will severely tax health care systems in coming decades.

Pioneering researcher, Professor Lord Robert Winston, will give a presentation on the opportunities that healthcare demands offer companies to expand and regenerate, at the Medical and Healthcare Industry Conference, at the Hyatt, Birmingham (4 June 2008).