Children's NSF to be published next year
Remaining sections of the National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services are to be published early in the new year, according to Professor Al Aynsley-Green, national clinical director for children and Nuffield Professor of Child Health at the Institute of Child Health, University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children.
The part devoted to hospital services has already been issued, and the
remaining seven — including one on medicines for children — will,
he hopes, be published together once ministers have approved them. Speaking
at the BPC on 16 September, Professor Aynsley-Green emphasised that the
NSF was only a starting point — implementation to ensure that services
were child-focused and not disease-focused was the challenge for the
next 10 years.
Professor Aynsley-Green also admonished the United Kingdom’s pharmaceutical
companies for using the ethical and practical constraints of conducting
trials on children as excuses for not ensuring that medicines were safe
for them. “We are now years behind the United States,” he
said, partly because incentives have recently been introduced in the
US to encourage pharmaceutical companies to conduct research into the
use of medicines in children. There are also indications that not many
people seem to be interested in research into drug delivery in children
in the UK.
Children’s
formulary The national formulary ‘Medicines
for children’ needs to be more widely circulated to include
primary care, according to Tony Nunn, director of pharmacy at the
Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital NHS Trust.
“It requires wider distribution, particularly to GPs and community prescribers
and to the new wave of prescribers. A product supported by the Department of
Health and distributed in the same way as the BNF would be ideal,” he said
during the BPC.
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