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1 week ago | 
nursinginpractice.com | Madeleine Anderson |Emma Wilkinson
The NHS and Royal Mail have secured a deal for an NHS-specific barcode on letters to ensure appointments and results are delivered on time, including at times of service disruption. Healthwatch England and the Patients Association are among the groups who came together to agree the changes. Once implemented, the barcode will replace manual extraction of NHS letters and be used to locate NHS letters where Royal Mail is not meeting expected delivery standards.
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1 week ago | 
nursinginpractice.com | Madeleine Anderson |Emma Wilkinson
UK public health officials have warned of worrying rises in infectious diseases since the pandemic, including those that can be prevented with vaccination. Measles, tuberculosis (TB), whooping cough, and sexually transmitted infections all saw notable increases in the year 2023/24, the first annual infectious diseases report from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) found.
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2 weeks ago | 
nursinginpractice.com | Madeleine Anderson |Emma Wilkinson
UK public health officials have reported a case of mpox clade 1b in England with no apparent travel history or link with previously confirmed cases. The patient in the North East of England was diagnosed in March and contact tracing did not identify any further cases. More work is being done by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to determine where the individual may have caught the infection, a statement said.
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3 weeks ago | 
healthcareleadernews.com | Emma Wilkinson |Beth Gault
The proportion of the NHS budget spent on mental health is being cut, health secretary Wes Streeting has admitted to Parliament. In 2025/26, mental health services will receive £15.6bn which amounts to 8.71% of the NHS baseline funding. While the mental health budget has increased from £14.9m the previous year, that amounted to 8.78% of the overall NHS budget.
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1 month ago | 
nursinginpractice.com | Madeleine Anderson |Emma Wilkinson
Smoking appears to be on the rise once more in some parts of England, warn researchers who have been tracking trends over two decades. An analysis of the effectiveness of regional tobacco control strategies also found that a large North-South divide in smoking prevalence seems to have disappeared. But data from 2006 to 2024 shows that progress in smoking cessation seems to have stalled in recent years with indications of rising rates in some areas.
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1 month ago | 
nursinginpractice.com | Megan Ford |Emma Wilkinson
Clade Ia and Ib mpox has been downgraded from a high consequence infectious disease in the UK, public health officials have confirmed. A review by the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens found that clade I mpox no longer meets the criteria as a high consequence infectious disease defined as having a high mortality rate and a lack of available interventions.
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1 month ago | 
pulsetoday.co.uk | Emma Wilkinson |Sofia Lind
NHS data has shown a further fall in prescribing costs for dependency-forming medicines. A quarterly update from the NHS Business Services Authority showed that while there had been little change in the numbers of items prescribed, costs of the drugs, which include opioid pain medicine, benzodiazepines and gabapentinoids, fell by £2m in October to December 2024. The cost of dependency-forming medicines prescribed was £91.1m – a 2.6% decrease from the £93.5m reported for July to September 2024.
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1 month ago | 
nursinginpractice.com | Madeleine Anderson |Emma Wilkinson
Europe saw the highest number of measles cases in 25 years in 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned. Across the region which includes 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia, there were 127,350 cases of measles reported last year, double that seen in 2023. The rise is linked to a drop in immunisation coverage in many countries during Covid-19, which has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, officials said.
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1 month ago | 
pulsetoday.co.uk | Emma Wilkinson |Sofia Lind
More than 2,200 GP practices had patients who had not been invited for screening due to an IT error related to incomplete registrations, a letter seen by Pulse has confirmed. A review by NHS England had found 5,261 people across the country had not been contacted to participate in one or more NHS screening programmes. The issue came to light after NHS England were contacted by a small number of people in the summer of 2024 due for screening who had not received an invite.
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1 month ago | 
pulsetoday.co.uk | Emma Wilkinson |Sofia Lind
Europe saw the highest number of measles cases in 25 years in 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned. Across the region which includes 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia, there were 127,350 cases of measles reported last year, double that seen in 2023. The rise is linked to a drop in immunisation coverage in many countries during Covid-19, which has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, officials said.
