dratalanta
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review into three unsafe medicines/medical products aimed at women has now published its report to the UK government (8 July 2020).
The report, First Do No Harm, calls for:
A weakness of the review is that the proposed Patient Safety Commissioner and Redress Agency would look at "medicines and medical devices" only. The review does not consider potential harms to patients from other types of medical intervention, such as activity regimens or psychological interventions. There is currently no UK mechanism for recording or monitoring these harms so that patient safety can be improved - as discussed in McPhee et al.'s "Monitoring Treatment Harm in Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Freedom-Of-Information Study of National Health Service Specialist Centres in England" (2019).
The report, First Do No Harm, calls for:
- a new Patient Safety Commissioner to "champion the patient voice"
- a new Redress Agency focused on "avoidable harm looking at systemic failings... [and] using a non-adversarial process. The support or redress offered could be both financial and non-monetary."
"1.18 We heard about the failure of the system to acknowledge when things go wrong for fear of blame and litigation. There is an institutional and professional resistance to changing practice even in the face of mounting safety concerns. There can be a culture of dismissive and arrogant attitudes that only serve to intimidate and confuse. For women there is an added dimension – the widespread and wholly unacceptable labelling of so many symptoms as ‘normal’ and attributable to ‘women’s problems’.
...
1.29 ... The failure of the healthcare system to respond to patient concerns is a recurrent theme... Patients often know when something has gone wrong with their treatment. All too often they are the first to know. Their experience must no longer be considered anecdotal and weighted least in the hierarchy of evidence-based medicine."
...
1.29 ... The failure of the healthcare system to respond to patient concerns is a recurrent theme... Patients often know when something has gone wrong with their treatment. All too often they are the first to know. Their experience must no longer be considered anecdotal and weighted least in the hierarchy of evidence-based medicine."
A weakness of the review is that the proposed Patient Safety Commissioner and Redress Agency would look at "medicines and medical devices" only. The review does not consider potential harms to patients from other types of medical intervention, such as activity regimens or psychological interventions. There is currently no UK mechanism for recording or monitoring these harms so that patient safety can be improved - as discussed in McPhee et al.'s "Monitoring Treatment Harm in Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Freedom-Of-Information Study of National Health Service Specialist Centres in England" (2019).