It has been a week since BIVDA’s Parliamentary Drop-In event on community diagnostics and we have been busy ensuring the key messages from the day remain at the forefront of stakeholders’ minds.
We’re encouraged by the positive feedback from partner organisations and attendees, who felt that MPs and peers from across the political spectrum were highly engaged with our core themes. There was clear consensus that shifting towards community-based care brings significant benefits for patients.
Since the event, we’ve followed up with the 30+ MPs and peers who attended or expressed interest, continuing conversations around the priorities set out in our policy declaration ahead of the forthcoming 10-Year Health Plan.
The immediate impact from our event was the tabling of a question pertaining to diagnostics and AMR in the House of Lords by Baroness Bennett. The peer, who we spoke to during the drop-in, asked DHSC what action they have taken towards achieving no antibiotic prescriptions without diagnostic confirmation by 2027, and what future plans they have to achieve that aim. We will notify members when an answer has been received.
Other parliamentarians have offered to raise parliamentary questions related to our consensus statement. We will work with them in the coming weeks to help shape their interventions.
We’ve also shared our publication with all major media outlets and industry press to ensure broad visibility of our message. It has been picked up by Pathology in Practice who covered the launch event here.
