MHRA launches new monthly safety bulletin and redesigned safety alerts

The new MHRA Safety Roundup provides a monthly summary of the latest safety advice for all medicines, medical devices, and healthcare products regulated by the MHRA, as part of our 3-year strategy to improve safety communications.

The MHRA has on 25 March launched a new monthly safety bulletin, the ‘MHRA Safety Roundup’, the latest step in a three-year Strategy for Improving Safety Communications to make medicines and medical device information clearer and more accessible for healthcare professionals.

The bulletin, which will be sent to subscribers and published online at the end of each month, provides a summary of all the MHRA safety alerts for the past month including drug safety updates (DSU), device safety information (DSI), national patient safety alerts, recalls and medicines notifications, and letters sent to healthcare professionals.

It also contains an MHRA news section highlighting key safety information about medicines, medical devices and healthcare products that may be of interest to readers.

The creation of the ‘MHRA Safety Roundup’ is in response to findings from our consultation on how the MHRA communicates safety information with healthcare professionals and organisations, which showed that healthcare professionals including GPs, nurses, and pharmacists found it useful to receive information at different frequencies, including monthly summaries, to suit their needs.

As part of our commitment to delivering the first year’s goals of the strategy, we have redesigned all our MHRA safety alerts to make critical safety advice clearer and easier to action, utilising colour, and relevant imagery to better engage healthcare professionals who often need to disseminate the information to their patients.

Work continues to improve the MHRA safety communications, and the next focus will be on strengthening engagement with patients and the wider public, including through use of communication methods that are tailored to their needs.

Healthcare professionals can subscribe to the ‘MHRA Safety Roundup’ here. For further information on how to find and subscribe to individual safety communications, visit MHRA website.