The Health Minister said a north-south body involved in healthcare cooperation cannot meet because there is no Stormont Executive
Health Minister Robin Swann said a north-south body involved in advancing healthcare cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic cannot meet because there is no power-sharing Executive.
Other ministers from the previous administration who were re-elected in May remain in post in a limited caretaker capacity. The Foyle MLA said: "Cross-border healthcare is just one of the huge number of important initiatives that have been held up due to the DUP's continued boycott of our institutions to serve their own selfish ends.
Each week, our Political Reporter Brendan Hughes pulls together some of the biggest and most important matters from Belfast and Northern Ireland that we think you’d be interested in reading.
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Contaminated blood scandal ‘tragedy’, says former health minister“It’s a tragedy and a scandal.” Lord Owen, a former health minister and a long-time campaigner on behalf of contaminated blood victims, tells cathynewman “there are huge lessons to learn in the way the department was run”.
Read more »
PowerWash Simulator players can now help gaming and mental health research while they sprayPowerWash Simulator developer FuturLab has launched a new initiative that'll enable players to opt-in and help independ…
Read more »
Contaminated blood scandal ‘too often ignored by those in power’“I’ve been covering this since the early nineties and it is a scandal. It’s a tragedy and one that was too often ignored by those in power.” vsmacdonald reports on the impact of the contaminated blood scandal.
Read more »
Increased risk of some neurological and psychiatric disorders remains two years after COVID-19 infectionA new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry from the University of Oxford and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre investigated neurological and psychiatric diagnoses in over 1.25 million people following diagnosed COVID-19 infection, using data from the US-based TriNetX electronic health record network.
Read more »
Renaming the Monkeypox Variants Curbs Stigma, Africa's CDC SaysThe World Health Organization is renaming the strains of the monkeypox disease
Read more »
Which countries need COVID-19 vaccines the most? Development of a prioritisation tool - BMC Public HealthBackground The COVID-19 pandemic and associated non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have affected all countries. With a scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines there has been a need to prioritize populations, but assessing relative needs has been challenging. The COVAX Facility allocates vaccines to cover 20% of each national population, followed by a needs assessment that considers five quantitative metrics alongside a qualitative assessment. The objective of this study was to identify the most important factors for assessing countries’ needs for vaccines, and to weight each, generating a scoring tool for prioritising countries. Methods The study was conducted between March and November 2021. The first stage involved an online Delphi survey with a purposive and snowball sample of public health experts, to reach consensus on country-level factors for assessing relative needs for COVID-19 vaccines. The second stage involved a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to determine weights for the most important factors. Results Responses were received from 28 experts working across 13 different countries and globally. The most common job titles reported were director and professor, with most based in national public health institutes (n = 9) and universities (n = 8). The Delphi survey found 37 distinct factors related to needs. Nine of the most important factors were included in the DCE. Among these, the most important factor was the ‘proportion of overall population not fully vaccinated’ (with a mean weight of 19.5), followed by ‘proportion of high-risk population not fully vaccinated’ (16.1), ‘health system capacity’ (14.2), ‘capacity to purchase vaccines’ (11.9) and the ‘proportion of the population clinically vulnerable’ (11.3). Conclusions Several factors exist, extending beyond those currently used, which may lead to some countries having a greater need for vaccines compared to others. By assessing relative needs, this scoring tool can build on existing methods to further the
Read more »