Treating those requiring anticoagulation during the COVID-19 pandemic

However, keeping hospital visits to a minimum has required other changes too. In March 2020, NHS England (2020) quickly devised a plan to switch patients who have previously had a blood clot and were...

Setting up a drug treatment service in a COVID-protect hotel in inner London

The hotel was a five-storey building in one of the borough's more affluent areas. Core staff continued to work at the hotel, including domestic and reception staff. Initially catering was outsourced...

A challenging winter lies ahead of us

COVID-19 booster vaccinations

In November 2021 the UK Health Security Agency (2021) announced that those ‘aged 50 years and over, health and social care workers and younger people at risk are being offered a booster dose of...

Healthcare workers must be protected

For many of you in clinical practice, although you have not stopped face-to-face contact, it has not been the same as it has been previously, and many patients have found the pandemic system confusing...

Drug Updates: October

Ronapreve, a combination of two monoclonal antibodies, is the first targeted medicine developed for COVID-19 to receive marketing authorisation from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory...

Overcoming vaccine hesitancy

I'm sure you have all read the more outlandish and outright illogical arguments for not having the COVID-19 vaccine, and these don't really warrant touching upon in a healthcare journal, but there are...

Refugees, migrants and health

On 20 June 2017 – the United Nations World Refugee Day – Abbas et al (2018) convened a workshop during the 4th International Conference on Prevention and Infection Control in Geneva. The authors note...

Living with long COVID

The new guideline for NICE (2021) recommends that patients presenting with new or ongoing symptoms 4 weeks or later after an initial COVID-19 infection should have the following investigations done; a...

Remote consultations, prescribing and virtual teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

Before the pandemic, the modernisation of the NHS included digitalisation and the use of remote consultations (NHS UK, 2019; Welsh Government, 2019; NHS Digital, 2020). There had been a slow but...

The role of community pharmacies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Pharmacies have played a vital role during the pandemic, not only by ensuring a stable supply of key medicines, but also in becoming an information hub regarding the virus. Many pharmacies are now the...

Prescribing issues in the COVID-19 pandemic

As we know as prescribers, antibiotic stewardship and appropriate prescribing of antibiotic therapy to reduce this incidence of resistance is an often-focussed field of research (Zhu et al, 2021). In...