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In a time when much health industry focus is on the European Commission’s Health Directorate, DG SANCO, EU Commissioner for Research Máire Geoghegan-Quinn chose Covidien’s 20 year celebration of their Galway, Ireland, facility (congratulations to all at Covidien) to emphasise again the value of the Medical Technology industry to Europe and the huge policy and funding support that she and her Directorate, DG Research, provide to the sector.

The 7th European Healthcare Fraud & Corruption Network conference took place in Brussels at the end of September and featured high level speakers and experts. The event proved to be an ideal platform for discussing a number of topics of relevance to all the stakeholders in the healthcare system. The “Conflicts of Interest” session was […]

‘Never knowingly under sold’ is a slogan that one major UK retailer has been using more or less continuously since 1925. I have never quite understood what it means. E-heath and telemedicine have been touted as the key to disruptive change in healthcare for a very long time. I recall spending an entertaining four days […]

The blogosphere has been driven into a foment over the last week or so by a paper by Groeneveld et al entitled ‘Increasing Use of Cardiovascular Devices and Rising Health Costs’. Its conclusions are interesting but, I suggest, not conclusive of anything which should prompt policy makers to ask further questions. Discounted for inflation the […]

Patient safety and public perception: transparency, transparency, transparency…In scanning the disparate output of the EU machine I came across a thought provoking survey of EU citizens on the subject of patient safety. Perception surveys are scientifically questionable as  they deal in the currency of (often poorly informed) individual’s views. Politically and from a policy perspective […]

In recent weeks within the pharmaceutical industry there has been much talk of both downsizing – GSK and AstraZeneca shedding 11,000 jobs – and outsourcing of research and development, with a whole range of licensing or partnership deals designed to pad out faltering product pipelines. Once again I was prompted to think about the prospect […]

Browsing the news pages of the web I came across an article in a journal that I am not familiar with from the USA, the grandly titled U.S. News & World Report. The report headed off on a familiar and now even more fashionable track of squarely identifying our industry as the villains of the […]

On Thursday 11 June, I attended, as part of the EULAR conference in Copenhagen – Europe’s largest conference on Rheumatology – the session “Structure modification in osteoarthritis: Time to update the guidelines”. What became really apparent was that rheumatologists from Europe and North-America are seriously concerned about the exponentially increasing prevalence and incidence of osteoarthritis […]