50 British Journal of General Practice, January 2014 IntroduCtIon The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has published an updated clinical guideline on assessment and treatment for people with fertility problems.1 The guideline covers the pathway from advice and information for people concerned about fertility to assisted reproduction techniques. The guideline includes reco...

Correspondence to: R Collins, Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK; [email protected] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T his article is based on a recent issue of Effective Health Care which focused on the research evidence for the management of head and neck cancers. The bulletin is based on a series of systematic reviews carried out by the Cen...

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) recently announced that interferon beta and glatiramer acetate were not cost effective treatments for multiple sclerosis and could not be recommended for NHS funding. As a result, the Department of Health and the manufacturers developed a “risk sharing scheme” aimed at providing these drugs more cost effectively. 3 Treatment will be provided...

Although blood transfusion is common in clinical practice, it is associated with some risk. Alternatives to blood transfusion are also underused. Audits in the United Kingdom show that the inappropriate use of blood components is 20% or more. This puts patients at unnecessary risk of receiving the wrong blood and of complications such as circulatory overload and transfusion related acute lung i...

A chronic wound is defined as one that does not heal in an orderly sequence or predictable timeframe and fails to progress along the wound-healing continuum. In the UK alone, there were recently estimated to be 1.3 million chronic wounds, of which 153,000 were pressure ulcers, 253,000 dehisced surgical wounds, 169,000 diabetic foot ulcers and 730,000 leg ulcers (Guest et al, 2015). A leg ulcer ...

In 2013, the UK Department of Health called for the abolition of the Liverpool care pathway, which was designed to bring a standard of care for the dying from the hospice sector into other settings. This move was provoked by an independent review, which showed that the pathway had been misused and misinterpreted as a tick box exercise. It called for individualised care plans and better staff tr...

Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) are the name given to a group of symptoms including dysuria and incontinence. The term was first coined in the 1990s to describe symptoms in men which had previously been known as prostatitis, to aid recognition that these symptoms were not always attributable to prostate problems and to reduce unnecessary prostate surgery. It was then widened to cover a "non...

IntrodUCtIon CMA is the commonest food allergy among children in the UK. Data from 2008 indicated 2.3% of 1–3 year-olds in the UK suffer from CMA.1 In 2011, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published Clinical Guideline (CG)116 on the Diagnosis and Assessment of Food Allergy in Children and Young People in Primary Care and Community Settings.2 It has become increasingly e...

Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) are the name given to a group of symptoms including dysuria and incontinence. The term was first coined in the 1990s to describe symptoms in men which had previously been known as prostatitis, to aid recognition that these symptoms were not always attributable to prostate problems and to reduce unnecessary prostate surgery. It was then widened to cover a "non...