Media Monitoring: 4th March – 10th March

Women’s and Health Minister, Maria Caulfield met leading researchers and discussed their work to improve health outcomes for women and babies, and the importance of women working in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths).
Although there has been a large increase in girls doing STEM A-Levels and being accepted on undergraduate degrees, in 2020 women still only made up 29.4% of the STEM workforce in the UK.
She said, “The brilliant women I met are changing the lives of women today, and those in the future. I want to see more girls following this career path.”

The government has announced an extension to the support provided to UK Horizon Europe applicants until the end of June 2023.
The scheme was originally launched in November 2021 and UKRI has issued grants worth more than £882 million to the end of February 2023
Successful awardees do not need to leave the UK to receive this funding, which will provide reassurance for future collaborations, and support UK researchers whether association is confirmed, or otherwise.

According to a research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine, prostate cancer screening frequently results in biopsies that find clinically insignificant cancer or no cancer at all.
It warns that PRS scores alone can lead to unnecessary procedures and underestimate aggressive prostate cancers.
The study states that using the most effective predictive tools against prostate cancer is vital, rather than simply relying on genetic scoring.

TV presenters Tommy Walsh and Alan Titchmarsh have joined forces with the NHS to support a first-of-its-kind cancer awareness campaign.
In a new film discussing the importance of bowel cancer screening, the famous faces will urge those eligible to return their lifesaving bowel cancer screening home tests.
Recent data showed almost one third (30%) of people do not return the potentially lifesaving tests.
The pair remark how the public “owes it to your family and yourself” to complete the quick test which can help detect the early signs of bowel cancer and is part of the NHS “Help Us Help You” campaign.

£25 million new funding allocated to create new women’s health hubs, as part of the Women’s Health Strategy for England.
The hub models will be tailored to meet local women’s needs. They will focus on delivering services in the community that better fit around women’s lives and streamline access to women’s health services.
Hubs aim to address fragmentation in provision, for example integrating cervical screening with other aspects of women’s health care. At the moment, women often need to attend multiple appointments and go to different places to access these essential services.

The NHS Monthly Diagnostics data for January 2023 can be found here.

The total number of patients waiting six weeks or more from referral for one of the 15 key diagnostic tests at the end of January 2023 was 486,000. This was 30.8% of the total number of patients waiting at the end of the month.
Nationally, the operational standard of less than 1% of patients waiting six weeks or more was not met this month.
Compared with January 2022, the total number of patients waiting six weeks or more increased by 51,700 while the proportion of patients waiting six weeks or more increased by 0.8 percentage points.
The proportion of patients waiting six weeks or more at the end of a month has varied between 24.0% (February 2022) and 31.3% (December 2022).
The estimated average time that a patient had been waiting for a diagnostic test was 2.9 weeks at the end of January 2023.
There were 1,580,200 patients waiting for a key diagnostic test at the end of January 2023. This is an increase of 129,000 from January 2022.
A total of 2,174,000 diagnostic tests were undertaken in January 2023. This is an increase of 268,000 from January 2022.