20th August 2021
about a 3 minute read
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News round-up (August 20)
News round-up (August 20)
Research England awarded £1.3m, through the Connecting Capabilities Fund, to London Advanced Therapies to expand its activity into a UK-wide collaborative network to connect existing regional clusters of excellence.
The network links partners across the North of England including the Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA) and a number of its member institutions, including The University of Manchester, The University of Sheffield, and Newcastle University.
NHS Shared Business Services (SBS) has issued a tender calling for intelligent automation (IA) vendors that supply “off the shelf” solutions.
The 48-month framework will allow NHS organisations to purchase IA services from pre-approved suppliers, streamlining the process of implementing IA in the health service.
Adam Nickerson, NHS SBS senior category manager of digital and IT, said: “Our goal is to give the NHS a choice of leading Intelligent Automation (IA) solutions to best support healthcare providers wherever they are on their journey towards realising the value of automation.
The registry is being developed under the Surgical Devices and Implants Direction and is designed to collect historic and current surgical device and implant data directly from NHS and private healthcare providers in the UK.
Initially focusing on pelvic floor procedures, including the use of mesh and comparable treatments, over time it will include all surgical specialities.
Content of the data to be collected (known as the data set) is found in the Surgical Devices and Implants Technical Specification available on the NHS Digital Website.
World Humanitarian Day 2021 fundraises ahead of Cop 26
This year’s World Humanitarian Day, August 19, was devoted to dealing with the climate crisis, and marking a milestone in the lead up to the COP26 summit in Glasgow in November.
The campaign by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, this year highlighted the immediate human cost of the climate crisis by launching a fundraising challenge to draw attention to Cop 26. The fundraising activities challenge closes August 31st.
The organisers say: “There is no vaccine for climate change. But we do have solutions. We must maximize the health benefits of tackling the climate crisis while avoiding its worst health impacts and promote climate-resilient health systems everywhere as we Build Back Better from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
UK medical schools must teach about climate crisis say students
Medical students are demanding their schools include the climate crisis as a core component of the curriculum, as the intensifying climate emergency highlights the corresponding health crisis.
Hannah Chase, a final year medical student at Oxford said the sense of urgency hit home recently when a fellow student confessed they didn’t believe in climate change. “It just shows that we make such assumptions,” said Chase. “It’s needed, this education.”
Polls suggest that nurses and doctors are seen as the most trustworthy professions in the UK. “If you had every NHS worker informed fully on how bad climate change is,” said Newman, “it would really help move things on a political level, just because I think people wouldn’t stand for it.”
